Customer Reviews

The King of Torts

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(121)
3 star:		(112)
2 star:		(86)
1 star:		(105)

 

 

3 Stars, I rated it. Why, because in spite of it all, I enjoyed the process of reading the book. It's the book as a whole that I hated.

I was travelling with a colleague on a business trip when she was reading this, and she told me not to bother. Not to be daunted, I picked it up.

She was right. I wanted to shoot myself at the end of the book. But that's the point - at the END of the book.

The book is gripping... very gripping. The first few pages fail to grab, but eventually you're hooked.

I found myself getting progressively euphoric, as Carter made his millions... and progressively depressed as things started falling apart. That's a power Grisham has - of involving the reader intimately.

But this book proved something I've suspected for a while. Occassionally, and more and more of late, John Grisham has a serious writer's block when it comes to ending.

His endings are like what some people have said to me about Pearl Jam's music (Which I didn't like hearing - I love Pearl Jam).

They never really end... just kind of stop being.

And this ending was a prime example of that... at some point, the Author's Note begins, and you're left thinking "HUH!?!??!"

"HUH?????!!!? I wanna burn this book" is not a good way for a book to leave you.. and hence, only 3 Stars for a book that, till about 75% of the book was a 5-Star.

Because the book left me with "HUH!??!?!?!"

I've been disillusioned with John Grisham for quite some time now. His latest books have just not measured up to the earlier ones, which feature thrilling plots and characters that you care about.

This isn't one of those earlier books.

Frankly, the minute that Clay Carter "sold his soul" for 15 million dollars (in the first few chapters of the book), I could predict the plot and the character development in two seconds. And I was pretty dead on.

The rest of the book is a dreary bore; attempting to give the reader a lesson in ethics, integrity, and doing the right thing. The problem is that Grisham is using Clay Carter, who has just taken 15 million for participating in a massive cover up with a big-wig pharmacutical company. With that small problem stuck in my mind, it was totally impossible for me to note or care when Clay suddenly decides to make it all better or do the right thing. Which was basically how I felt about all of the characters, from Clay's shallow, materialistic ex-fiance (real love-give me a break) to Clay's boring, narcissistic father.

Take it from me: skip this one, go back and read "A Time to Kill", "The Firm", or "The Rainmaker". It will be time better spent.

I found this book particularly interesting because I work in health care. Health care has spawned the side industry of health-related legal settlements. Class action lawsuits have taken this industry to a whole new level, and this book exposes the mechanisms of this legal area with Grisham's usual attention to detail and to the meticulous unfolding of the story. When thousands of people are physically or emotionally harmed by medications, products,etc. and hundreds of millions of dollars are mobilized, who benefits and why? Luxury jets, palacial homes, yachts, Caribbean getaways, mistresses populate this landscape. The view leaves one nauseous. The book has excitement and suspense and moves swiftly to the end.

John Grisham's The King of Torts focuses on a lawyer named Clay Carter. He's a small time attorney in the public defender's office who is handed an unwinable murder case. A young man has shot someone in cold blood and Clay has to defend him. Just as he is about to get his way out of the case, a man approaches him and gives him the opportunity to make a lot of money by dropping the case, quitting his job with the PD, and opening his own firm. He learns that the young man who he was defending may not have been completely responsible for the murder and a drug company wants things swept under the rug.

This starts a chain of events that leads him to the top of the legal profession by doing mass class action suits, settling the cases, raking a third off the top, and paying his clients the pittance they had been promised. He wants more than anything to get back his girlfriend, who dumped him when he had no foreseeable future. Now he has a new life, new woman, new friends, and even his own jet.

But things are not all well. He is blind to things happening right in front of his face. I mentioned in my title that this book is like Citizen Kane. The main character in that film, Charles Foster Kane, is only concerned with money and power, and he achieves it at the cost of all human personal relationships. Clay Carter is also power hungry, but in a different way. His wealth is more tenuous and he eventually succumbs to his desires.

This book is very well written, interesting, fast paced, and fun. I read it in one evening, without putting it down. The message is a good one and it is something different from Grisham. Not a second of this book is in a courtroom. The legal proceedings take place in the form of settlements. After the many books he has written, Grisham still has the ability to weave interesting stories around great characters. I loved this book.

This was my very first Grisham novel to actually read all the way through. I really enjoyed it! I was drawn in right from the beginning. I love the way Grisham tells the story of Clay's rise to fame, and all the details in between. I loved it :-)

I'm a fan of John Grisham and I've read almost all his books.

This 'King of Torts' was absolutely crap! When I finished it I actually checked and double checked the author, yes it said John Grisham...

Couldn't believe it...

Remi

AWESOME...his best book to date!! I read some of the negative reviews here (one about the temperature accuracy in Flagstaff- give me a break!) Grisham can always create interesting desriptive characters but sometimes faulters on the plot. In this book he nailed both. I was disapointed with the Brethern and Testament but I couldn't put this book down!!! I highly recommend it.

I thought this was one of Grisham's best. I read "The Brethren" before this book, but didn't become quite as attached to the characters as I did in this book. Even though Clay was greedy he captured my heart and I couldn't wait to see what happened to him.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book for an easy and fun read.

If this novel had not captured my interest from the beginning, I would be giving it a one star. The plot was very interesting, the there was a ton of suspense. I enjoyed the jump that Grisham made from the ghettos of DC to the luxurious life of a mass tort lawyer.

However, near the ending, I did not feel as if the novel was complete. Many details were forgotten, and many questions were left unanswered. Its as if Mr. Grisham took his time writing the novel, but near the end got hurried into finishing it. For example, the CEO of one of the evil pharmaceutical companies mentions that there is a dark secret about his drug that no one must know. And a source attempts to contact Clay, but never does. None of these points was answered at all.

Overall, I must say that I liked reading the book very much, but was very dissapointed with the ending.

Every time I finish a Grisham novel, I swear that I will never read another one. But later, in a moment of weakness while browsing an airport gift shop for a light read during the flight or flipping through a copy of his latest paperback that has been strategically placed with the other impulse items in the checkout line at the grocery store, I will pick up another.

Like all of Grisham's novels, this was an enjoyable enough read, although painfully familiar and predictable to anybody who has read 3 or 4 of his other legal thrillers. However, I found this one to be one of his weaker novels. I found the main character, one Clay Carter, to be very unbelievable. Whether he was running his very lucrative, $100 million dollar law firm almost solely on basis of the vague tips received from mysterious stranger that he knows very little about or was short selling 100,000 shares of a pharmaceutical company on the eve of his firm's filing a class action lawsuit against that company - after instructing his accountant to be very conservative with the books ("No sense trying to beat the government out of a some taxes. Pay them and sleep well") only four pages earlier, I had a hard time taking this character seriously. (What was more infuriating than the inconsistency regarding the insider trading incident was the fact that it didn't occur to Mr. Carter that there was anything illegal about the trade until about 200 pages later in the novel, and even then, he concluded that it was probably 'a gray area' - I guess Mr. Carter slept through those securities law courses at Georgetown Law School.)

But more than that, when I finished this book, I was left feeling less than satisfied. Mr. Grisham is usually very good about tying off all of the loose ends and packaging his endings with a nice moralistic bow. Unfortunately, he doesn't do so with this book.