Rating: 
Summary: Greed and Morality ~ gray areas all
Review: Its a vexing question? Do mass tort (class action) lawsuits serve or savage the public at large...Do they destroy good businesses that have unforeseen problems, or police the scallywags of corpoarate America? IS it fair for an attorney to bag HUGE profits if he uncovers a dastardly result from a consumer product gone awry?Yes to all, and herein lies the basis for this impeccible thriller about Clay the lawyer who is handed the case of a lifetime by a shadowy charcter, Max Pace. Rich beyond his wildest dreams, Clay goes from civil servant hack to a Gulfstream riding hot shot in mere months. the story is an excellent ride of suspense and intrique ~ of love lost and love gained and a scintillating morality play not be missed.. a great read!
Rating: 
Summary: The Grish Get Grisher
Review: After "The Chamber", you can separate John Grisham's annual legal thrillers into two categories: A) Rich lawyers who stumble upon millions of dollars, and
B) Poor lawyers who stumble upon millions of dollars. The amount of millions in each novel may vary -- $50 million in "The Rainmaker" spiralling all the way up to $106 milion in "The King of Torts" -- but the common thread is that fortune is illusory. Another point is that, up through "The Chamber", Grisham's protagonists usually got happy endings -- he left a good portion of Southeastern lawyers swanning about the Caribbean -- but since then, most of his lawyers wind up with nothing. Working within this narrow formula, "The King of Torts" is probably Grisham's most interesting legal thriller since "The Street Lawyer". Clay Carter, a 31 year-old criminal defense attorney, spends the first 75 pages of the book toiling in anonymity in Washington D.C., and these pages are well done. No sooner has Clay spurned a lucrative job offer and been dumped by his (very attractive) girlfriend than does a mysterious windfall appear, brought by a shady figure called "Max Pace". For a while, Clay becomes uber-rich, running scam after scam for Pace and his unseen cronies. But the pursuit of money inevitably leads to mayhem and intrigue in these books, so you know all the warning signs even before Clay's new world collapses around him (shortly after page 300 in the paperback, if you want to skip ahead to his downfall). If you like the formula, you'll like this book better than most. Clay's mistakes are more egregious than those of previous Grisham characters, and his fate is the dimmest of all. This gives "The King of Torts" a little more unpredictability. The most (or least) interesting twist to "The King of Torts" is returning character Patton French, who had a pointless extended cameo in "The Summons". Here, French and his ilk (mass tort lawyers thriving off the federal class-actions system) take center stage. Their scenes are played for comedy: gigantic private jets, luxurious yachts, beautiful women, enornmous amounts of money, etc. A few lawyers are given depth, but you have to buy into the notion that the one-dimensional super-rich actually exist, before you can enjoy their scenes. In the end, Grisham is not so much decrying their system, as he is the way they practice law: that is to say, without ever setting foot in the courtroom. Come to think of it, it's now been years since Grisham wrote a novel that took place in the courtroom. Maybe it's time he moved away from the piles of money, so he can get back to reality himself.
Rating:
Summary: The hypocrisy of lawyers
Review: John Grisham's tale of Clay Carter's rise to tort law fame lacks the suspense of many of his other works, but that doesn't mean it failed to produce a salient point about the tort law system in America. The system consists of simply a transfer of millions of dollars from big corporations to trial lawyers with the plaintiffs getting hosed two times over. Grisham has made it a point in recent legal thrillers like The Runaway Jury and The Summons to foucs on greed and human nature, and he succeeds with this latest attempt. It is my hope that Grisham's next legal thriller will get back to the page-turning drama of books like The Client and The Firm.
Rating: 
Summary: Pathetic and even shameful
Review: "The King of Torts" is just a jeremiad against the mass tort bar posing as a legal thriller, and is not worth your hard-earned money. Grisham decries the greed and what he deems to be the undeserved wealth of plaintiffs' attorneys, while trying to pass off this 500-page screed as high-quality fiction--a con just as or more despicable than anything done by the lawyers Grisham denigrates. I'm not saying that personal convictions and muckraking have no place in literature (I like "The Grapes of Wrath" and "The Jungle" fine), but such convictions and muckraking must be delivered via a STORY. "The King of Torts" has no story. It is just a string of episodes designed to excite disgust in the reader. Unfortunately for Grisham, he succeeds--but the disgust is not directed at trial lawyers, but at him.
Rating: 
Summary: Greed
Review: Clay Carter is a young lawyer working for the Office of the Public Defender where the hours are long and the pay is less than generous. He is dating a woman from a rich family that doesn't consider him son-in-law material. Out of the blue, Clay receives an offer that is too good to be true. As a reader we realize this, and one would think that any decent person would see it as well, except if the person's judgement is clouded by greed. This is what this entire novel revolves around. Clay completes a few extremely lucrative settlements, guided by a mysterious source named Max Pace that just happens to have access to secret reports that can help him win his cases. In my opinion, the story drags on a little bit when Grisham describes the various cases his main character is involved in, especially since there doesn't seem to be a common thread between them. There also doesn't seem to be much in terms of a resolution in the story involving Tequila Watson, the case Clay was working on when he sold out for the money.
Rating:
Summary: Not one of his best...
Review: I've read almost all of Grisham's books and can usually count on them for a good read. This book disappointed me greatly. The main characters, Clay and Rebecca, don't turn out to be very likeable; he's as greedy as all lawyers are made out to be and she's a golddigger. I found myself not caring whether they got back together, and actually hoping he might do some jail time. At the end we find out that greed is good if the cards fall your way, and if they don't, well, you still get the girl, your friends will give you some of their misbegotten fortune, and you can fly off to London and start a new life. Quoting, "He had Rebecca all to himself, and nothing else mattered." Well how about the thousands of people he screwed over in order to maximize his own wealth... don't they matter? Grisham did a good job of exposing the greed behind mass tort reform, but the story he wrote as a vehicle for his expose left me cold.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Grisham's Best
Review: I was about half way through this book when I realized it was going nowhere. I was expecting something, anything, to happen. The characters were thin and the plot bounced along from case to case. Really glad it's over.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to Grisham's other efforts
Review: This book as well as Bleachers is well below other thrillers I have read by this author. The book merely tells the story of a mass tort lawyer, and how fast he can rise to the top and fall back down. It seems that Grisham does a lot better when he is writing thrillers!
Rating:
Summary: Long and drawn out
Review: I have liked Grisham's stuff depsite the archetypal characters and sometimes hackneyed storylines... that's part of the allure for me of reading Grisham. I was expecting a mystery or a thriller, etc but this book just dragged on and on... It was a boring lesson in morality and an attempt to document the decline of a tort lawyer. I kept expecting a mystery but instead got a boring tale of excess, greed, and torts.
Rating:
Summary: Involving and Fun
Review: This book was the first book I had ever read from John Grisham.
It was a very good book in my opinion, and Mr. Grisham did a very nice job of keeping the story flowing, and getting me to the point where I really actually cared what happened to the characters. My feelings at the end of the book were, "If this is one of John Grisham's 3 star books, well I can't wait to read one of his five star ones..."
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