Rating: 
Summary: Tort Lawywers are bad, and so is this book
Review: As I began to read the King of Torts, I was under the impression that Clay Carter of the Public Defenders Office was going to sue a drug company and make billions. I thought this would be just like the Rainmaker or the Street Lawyer with Grisham taking on evil, corporate America.Clay Carter does get this chance and he makes a quick fortune through dubious methods and then takes on a case that could make him millions of dollars. At this point, the King of Torts switches gears and becomes something totally unexpected and also pretty boring and dissappointing. Clay Carter started out as an underdog with a chance to change his life. But then Clay turns into the person we all hate, the evil tort lawyer. Grisham shows his obvious distaste for the evil greed of the bigtime tort lawyers, and that redeems this book in some fashion. Yet the story it is trying to tell takes on more of a biographical tone of Clay Carters life. There are no twists or turns or good guys or bad guys. Things just happen to Clay Carter, good and bad, and we are along for the ride. I didn't totally hate this book because its message is against tort lawyers and their greed, but the King of Torts is a big disappointment. There is no depth to the characters. All characters are just an accessory to Clay's life from the bimbo girlfriend to the jilted fiance to the other lawyers who work with him. Grisham has definitely been in a slump lately, with the Painted House being his best work. Grisham is still obviously a great writer, I just hope he soon decides to write a thriller type novel instead of a biography of a greedy tort lawyer.
Rating: 
Summary: the ending could have been better
Review: I probably should have given it 4 stars. The book was a quick enjoyable read. The main charachter Clay is someone you root for. I just thought he could have put a better ending especially because Grisham set up and ending that would have been awesome , but he didn't go that root. But how can i rip on a book that took me 2 days to read and didn't want to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: Better!
Review: "The King of Torts" by John Grisham reminded me a lot of "The Firm". No one can write a sleazy lawyer better than Grisham. I haven't liked his more recent books as well as the first ones, and this one is more like the old Grisham. "A Time to Kill" is still my favorite, though. That's Grisham at his best.
Rating: 
Summary: No Real Insight into the Legal World but a Fun Read!
Review: I enjoyed reading this book although I was hoping for something more. As an aspiring lawyer, I was hoping for a captivating insight into tort law and the life of a mass media ambulance chaser. However, I found this installment of Grisham's legal series to be a lot like watching reality tv (All entertainment, no substance). The story had all the drama and romance a popular novel enthuiast could ask for and I found the story line to be a page turner. I would recommend this book for the person who likes a good drama and cares little about the legal field.
Rating: 
Summary: The King of Torts
Review: The story just seemed to go no where. Just about a lawyer who took an underhanded deal to make a lot of money and just kept on doing the same thing when other opportunties came along while missing his girl friend the whole time inspirt of the honey on his arm. Of course he lost all the money, never helped out the little community that he broke the biggest employer in and after getting beat up won the old girlfriend back and headed to the islands with some money his over paid employees gave him. John's run out of good lawyer stories.
Rating:
Summary: Had my attention for 75% of the book
Review: It held my attention through 75% of the book and then I got lost in the boring end. I really like Grisham as a writer and always expect a lot. He's always good and this started great but I did not like the latter part of the story. I'll continue to read more Grisham books but this was not one of his better works.
Rating:
Summary: Grisham spins a good yarn
Review: Clay Matthews is an attorney laboring in the halls of public defender when an unbelievable offers falls into his lap. Max Hayes arrives on the scene and convinces Clay to leave behind his meager career and move into swank offices and become the hotshot in the legal world. The money scenarios he throws at Clay are
unbelievable and the case he is giving him I have read before in a novel. What makes this novel work is Grisham can take a yarn and spin into a masterpiece. Before Clay can catch his breath he is raking in millions of dollars and has more cases for civil action that he can imagine. His colleagues who traveled this
path with him are starting to get preoccupied with the money and don't see the bridges burning underneath them. In the end Clay gets what he really wanted when he took the first case. Grisham last two novels were lackluster in my opinion and wrote for the big screen. In this novel he wrote with passion and didn't let the lure of Hollywood force his characters into stereotype situations and the ending wasn't abrupt. Since
I read this book in 24 hr. I must rate it a 10 which it greatly earned in my opinion.
Rating:
Summary: Same old
Review: Same plot, different names. Lawyer gets suckered into shady dealings, after many problems complicated by his own character flaws, sees the light and tries to redeem himself. I just wish that the main character could, for once, do some jail time for his misdeeds and not end up on a jet to some foreign paradise with a faithful lover and a couple of mil stashed in a Swiss bank. I did enoy reading about the machinations of class action suits. This book is a good way to spend a few hours on a plane, if one doesn't mind stereotypes.
Rating:
Summary: The King of Torts
Review: After having read some of the other reviews I would have to agree that John Grisham has not put much effort in his last few books. I felt that in The King of Torts he floundered with his character development. I also felt he never completely developed the story.
I also had a hard time with the story because it hit a little too close to home for me. I am also taking an arthritis drug of the newer generation and am concerned about potential side effects in the future. My only hope is that I don't end up with as shallow a lawyer as was portrayed in the book if I should!
All in all though, I would have to say that if John Grisham put out a book tomorrow I would be one of the first ones in line to buy it!
Rating:
Summary: Closer to Grisham.
Review: Like several reviewers, I have been less than enthralled with Grisham's latest legal thrillers. His last thriller, THE SUMMONS, in my opinion, was a yawner. However, after a brief sojourn into classic fiction with A PAINTED HOUSE and SKIPPING CHRISTMAS (which I highly recommend), Grisham has clawed his way back into the arena that made him the King of Legal Thrillers. THE KING OF TORTS is classic Grisham, in the form of A TIME TO KILL, THE FIRM, and my all-time favorite, THE PELICAN BRIEF. While KING OF TORTS still doesn't quite measure up, it is incredibly good. What makes THE KING OF TORTS so good is the conceptual elements fans have grown to love about Grisham's thirllers: an underdog young attorney, a mysterious and clandestine protagonist, greasy "ambulance-chasing" attorneys and unscrupulous corporations. In the end, as always, it's all about the dollar. Our "hero" in this thriller is J. Clay Carter II, a low-paid public defender in Washington, D.C. Clay has a well-to-do fiancée, Rebecca Van Horn who, along with her pugnacious mother and father continually nettle Clay to take a more lucrative job. His future in-laws are everything Clay despises. When he wontonly rejects Mr. Van Horn's offer of a corporate position making more than twice his PD pay, Rebecca dumps him for an geeky Ivy Leaguer. Concurrent with his personal life heading south, Clay has just been ambushed into handling the defense of Tequila Watson, a young black man who shot a friend named "Pumpkin" (lively names). Although totally unmoved, Clay is intrigued as to why Tequila can't remember killing Pumpkin. It's as though his mind has been washed away...with drugs, Clay suspects. After issuing subpoenas for all the medical files from the street-tough drug rehabilitation center where Tequila was being treated, Clay gets the call of his young life. As Grisham describes him, "the man in black." Clay meets the man in black, Max Pace, an ex-lawyer cum "fireman," hired to solve problems on behalf of a variety of unnamed companies. His current "project" is on behalf of a major pharmaceutical company, which has just pulled the plug on a bad drug...a drug that has the side effects of making ex-addicts kill for no apparent reason. Pace's job for Clay? Offer the victims' families large settlements NOT to pursue any potential investigation or legal action. For this, Clay will receive a cool $15 million. Clay takes an extremely short moment and decides that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Why, he would be foolish to turn it down, wouldn't he? Sure to his word, Max makes Clay a millionaire with a few short weeks of work. And, to add pleasure to ecstasy, Max has another, much larger "deal" for Clay. This deal involves another bad drug but this time, Clay gets to play the mass tort game. This, all from "tips" provided by the mysterious Max Pace. As Clay's new lawsuit takes form, he lands thousands of class-action suits and is dubbed by the major media "The King of Torts." As the pitiful pharmaceutical company decides to settle with Clay and his newly minted legal bretheren, Clay is two-for-two, only this time, his take isn't $15 million; it's $100 million! Like taking candy from a baby. Clay believes he's this good and here comes the element creating problems for most, greed. As Clay acquires a yacht (for his father), a private plane, an island retreat and a trophy girlfriend, he burns through his new found wealth at an astonishing pace both for pleasure and in funding his next legal bonanza. But, like Mitch McDeere, Grisham's protagonist in THE FIRM, Clay soon learns that his newly acquired riches come with a price he can't afford to pay. Grisham's glimpse into the world of mass tort attorneys is poignant and timely. How many commercials do we see on television from those soliciting our aches, pains, and more frighteningly, our health. The multi-million dollar advertising campaigns they use to attract clients and the huge sums they extract from big corporations are astonishing albeit fetid. Unlike many of the Hollywood stories, not all mass tort actions have "happy" endings. In some cases, attornys undeservingly obtain riches simply because the defendant corporation believes it can spend less to settle than to litigate. At some surreal level, this crack in our legal system is one that is uncomfortable at best; horrifying at worst. In many cases, good, well-intentioned companies are forced into bankruptcy and the victims, who suffered the most, are left with little after attorney's fees. Grisham sets a good pace for this storyline and develops the characters quite well. The only problem I saw with THE KING OF TORTS is, having set up strong characters and revealed the conspiracy, Grisham spins the story to a condensed close. While this glimpse of the Grisham of old is encouraging, the sprial down to climax was a return to the recent past. This doesn't spoil the book, as a whole, but it does bring the awestruck level down to solid. A good book, a fun read. I hope this is only peek into Grisham's future direction. Maybe, just maybe, we'll see another PELICAN BRIEF in the making.
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