Product Description

The Office of the Public Defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long, and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D. C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles upon a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He, suddenly, finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life - that would make him, almost overnight, the legal profession's newest king of torts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101958 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
John Grisham's The King of Torts demonstrates that his narrative skills remain as impeccable as ever. Grisham knows exactly what he's doing when it comes to transfixing the reader.

Within the high-powered milieu of the public defender's office in Washington DC, Grisham's protagonist is an ambitious young lawyer who finds himself saddled with what appears to be a nothing case: one of a wave of crack cocaine killings that are the bane of the capital. But as Clay Carter investigates, he finds that something more than a random street murder is involved here and a massive conspiracy becomes apparent. The stakes are suddenly very high indeed.

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

Review
John Grisham could certainly be said to have earned his position as one of the bestselling crime writers in the world; after all, he inaugurated (almost single-handedly) the entire genre of the legal thriller as we know it today, and his host of imitators have rarely matched the skill so evident in such novels as The Firm, The Client and The Pelican Brief. Set in the cut-throat world of the public defender's office in Washington DC, The King of Torts touches all the usual bases. Grisham's hero this time is an ambitious young lawyer who is handed a case that initially appears to be nothing more than one of the host of crack cocaine killings that plague the capital. But as he digs deeper, the tentacles of a massive conspiracy begin to appear: a conspiracy that has implications for nothing less than the entire justice system itself. All the customary John Grisham fingerprints are satisfyingly in evidence here: the resourceful, beleaguered lawyer protagonist, the labyrinthine plot in which small details begin to paint a much larger canvas, and that unflagging narrative drive that has propelled the author to the stellar position he enjoys today. And there's a new lean quality in the prose that makes this something of a new departure for Grisham. As usual, an indifferent movie will probably be made of the book, but the canny reader would do well to go straight to the source, where the real pleasure lies. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
The Office of the Public Defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long, and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D. C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles upon a conspiracy too horrible to believe. He, suddenly, finds himself in the middle of a complex case against one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, looking at the kind of enormous settlement that would totally change his life - that would make him, almost overnight, the legal profession's newest king of torts.

Customer Reviews

An efficient legal documentary
As an introduction to Grisham's field, The King of Torts is a little hard going. It manages to combine page-turning enthusiasm with a believable fiction, but with a level of detail that borders on textbook case history. To a reader brought up on science fiction and fantasy worlds, paragraphs about high-powered spending and the complexities of the legal world are rather less easily digested, but Grisham keeps things moving and the nearly 500 pages are dispatched effectively.

More seasoned readers will probably wish for more development of the supporting characters, but this one is all about how one man so disinterested with ostentatious wealth can so easily change. But it's also a simple love story in which money and power threaten in equal measure to make or break a relationship.

Unusual tale.
I found this book disappointing, and not as gripping as the usual Grisham books.He has a message to get across about the pursuit of wealth and how easy it can become the sole focus in life to the detriment of the main character.Not the usual tale you'd expect.

A Deal with the Devil is Never What it's Cracked Up to Be
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