THE KING OF TORTS: JOHN GRISHAM

This is one of those easy reads, where half way through you have the sneaking suspicion that you have read this novel a couple of years ago.  But it does not stop you from going on, still wondering why this seems familiar.  And I cannot tell you if I have read it before or not.

In this fast, easy read,  Clay Carter, a nothing lawyer in the Public Prosecutor's office, ends up being chosen, by whom and for what reason we are not sure, to head a suit holding a drug company responsible for the complications from their drug.  He listens to his insider, does as he is told, and ends up reaping millions of dollars literally overnight.  Things only get better for him and the few people whom he brings along.  He starts to run around with the big boys, making more and more millions, buying a house, a jet, an vacation home on the Caribbean, all the result of his chance connection.  The only thing missing is the girl her loves, one Rebeca Mc Kay, daughter of an obnoxious Senator whom Clay hates.  Just before his good fortune, of course, he breaks up with Rebecka and her parents because he's such a failure in their eyes.

He ends up starting a law firm with his class action suits, makes over a 110 million bucks in a year, becomes famous in DC as the King of Torts though he always had second thoughts about the rightness of what he is doing, basically low balling his clients monetary rights, by putting them in a class action suit, then setting with the drug company, making himself millions, his clients sometimes as little as 50 grand.  The virtue of the book is we get to see how ruthless and vulgar the big cat tort lawyers can be, as they scramble to assembly class action suits.  Everything seems fine until it isn't.  Clay goes one step to far, loses a law suit, unheard of usually, as drug companies settle.  And a number of the old clients, especially those who lost their jobs when he refused to settle with a cement company in a small town in PA, attack him outside his house in DC, blaming him and his law firm for losing their jobs.  We see how the effects of law suits effect the little guy in this case.  As we expect, Clay loses everything, the jet, the beautiful  girl, the villa, his office, and his home but gets the girl, Rebeca Van Horn, in the end.  He leaves town with Rebeca, his last flight on his corporate jet and that's the last we hear from them.