The King of Torts

If the skulduggery here (involving one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world) is a tad familiar, Grisham remains nonpareil when it comes to delivering a smoothly engineered plot. A fresh touch is Carter's desire to break free from the routine cases he has been handling: this quickly becomes a case of beware what you wish for. Another innovative touch is the refusal to tie up the narrative in the expected ways: The King of Torts has much more verisimilitude in this area than most legal thrillers. One more thing, Grisham's prose now has a sardonic, satirical quality that suggests the Tom Wolfe of Bonfire of the Vanities. --Barry Forshaw

Reader Reviews:

A Deal with the Devil is Never What it's Cracked Up to Be (0/0 people found this helpful)

Clay Carter is thirty-one, has a girl friend he cares about and works for the Office of the Public Defender in Washington DC. Nobody gets rich working for the OPD, but Clay tells himself it's work that must be done and he gives his clients his best effort. He's just finished a long murder case and is sort of suckered into another as he is the only OPD attorney in court at the wrong time and the judge assigns him the Tequila Watson case. Tequila, it seems, walked out of a rehab center on a short pass, got a gun and shot a small time dealer named Pumpkin to death for no apparent reason.

On top of having to do another thankless murder case, his girl's sleazy, developer father has lined up a job with a congressman for Clay that pays more that twice what he's getting at OPD. Clay, who wants to be his own man, rejects the offer and his girl rejects him.

Enter Max Pace, a mysterious stranger who claims to be a lawyer for an unnamed pharmaceutical company, but who looks like he spends all his time in the gym. Pace tells Clay that his client has been testing a new drug that is supposed to help cure addiction, but that a new side affect has been discovered. It turns a very small amount of users into killers. Tequila had been on the drug. Max wants Clay to pay off the victim's relatives without giving up the company's name. He offers Clay a gang of money and promises bigger things to come.

Clay quits the OPD and does what Max asks and Max keeps his promise by clueing Clay into a rival company's bad drug, one that causes bladder tumors in some of the users. Max steers Clay into the world of Mass Tort litigation. Clay's cut of the settlements makes him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Of course what he's doing is highly unethical, maybe illegal, but he's got a new townhouse, a new car, a corporate jet, a flashy new girlfriend who is spending his money like crazy and eventually the FBI breathing down his neck.

This is a wonderful "Man who sold his soul to the Devil" story and as usual John Grisham has breathed real life into characters we care about. We know from the beginning that Clay's rapid rise to the top is going to eventually wind up with a fall just as rapid, we wait for it, but what we don't know is how Clay will handle the failure and that is what makes the story work, what makes it special. But heck, it's gotta be special, John Grisham wrote it.

Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne

Greed (1/1 people found this helpful)

If you thought you didn't like lawyers before....wait to you read about the world of mass torts. The lawyers find a large corporation that has put out a faulty product and they sign up all the clients they can find that used that product and had an adverse affect. Then they file a class action suite. Their goal is to pressure/blackmail the company into a quick settlement that really only makes money for the lawyers.

This Grisham book is a very fast paced and I could not put it down. Read it in one evening. Our protagonist is a lawyer that gets easily pulled into the world of class action suites. And then goes on a crazy ride as greed controls his every move.

So pick it up for a quick ride through the world of class action suites...It will open your eyes and give you a couple evenings of entertaining reading.

king of torts ? more like King of Warts (0/0 people found this helpful)

This was my first Grisham for a number of years, my previous reads were typical Grisham 'classics', a Time to Kill through to the Partner, but this is such a dire book I think this will be my last.
The first 80 pages read pretty well, but then followed a series of unlikely and convoluted scenarios I had given up with the main character, Clay Carter, and wished the book was 250 pages and not the tiresome 486 that it is.......

Couldn't finish reading (0/0 people found this helpful)

I have read most of Grisham novels but I couldn't almost finished reading this one. Grisham has created a stupid lawyer character who had audacity to attack big corporations without idea what he is doing and his bloated ambition that would destroy him. He is also financially-stupid and no idea of liabilities.
I won't recommend this book to people who are looking for suspense, this book is very predictable.

Classic Grisham, bac k in the courtroom (1/2 people found this helpful)

The king of torts, I didn't know what a tort was until I picked up this book. A tort is a big mass action against a particular company or individual and it's classic Grisham at his very very best. No real action, no mass murders in the park, gang rapes or kidnaps. Just a good old Grisham yarn, well written, imaginative and a highly believable book.

John Grisham

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