John Grisham’s latest novel, “The King of Torts,” tells the story of the young lawyer Clay Carter’s rise and fall through a legal field portrayed as little more than cattle herding – round up the clients, settle the case.
One day, Carter works at the Office of the Public Defender making about $40,000 a year; the next day, he owns his own law firm, jet, yacht, tropical getaway home and has a supermodel girlfriend. Ridley, the model, wants money; Carter wants sex, and neither of them is fooling anybody. Carter would dump his bombshell girl if Rebecca, the woman he dated for four years, would just come back to him. Too bad her affluent parents rejected him before his rise to legal royalty.
Pace’s client, a large drug company, tested an anti-crack drug in the Washington area that inexplicably drove some of its users to murder. Max Pace, a self-described fireman, tells Carter that if he can get the families of the deceased to each take a couple million dollars with no questions asked, Carter will receive $15 million in legal fees and his own law firm to fight a separate case against Pace’s client’s competitors, Ackerman Labs.
The plotline is clich