Rating: 
Summary: Good read
Review: This was an enjoyable book. I liked the humor. My favorite scene was the wedding reception. It's not really a thriller; it's a morality play about selling your soul. What I like most about Grisham is that he can write (something a lot of bestselling authors don't seem to know how to do). It's amazing how he can make a topic like torts sound facinating.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Grisham book ever...
Review: I'm a fan of John Grisham and I've read almost all his books.This 'King of Torts' was absolutely crap! When I finished it I actually checked and double checked the author, yes it said John Grisham... Couldn't believe it... Remi
Rating:
Summary: Heard any good lawyer jokes lately? How about stories?
Review: My My, here's another good book with average reviews. Must have been a bunch of lawyers reviewing Grishams latest book. Ok, here's Mr D's high Four Star review. So start with a lawyer joke. Question: What is six Lawyers bound and gagged at the bottom of a lake?
Answer: A good start. I'm not a proponent of hanging all lawyers from the nearest tree, there are some decent hard working ones, but I personally would like to see a few in hell. Now John Grisham on the otherhand, is a winner when it comes to the law. He writes about about unsavory unethical members of the legal profession and makes millions doing it. Good for him. He's strayed a couple times but his best work is legal thrillers, and don't you get the feeling that it's a labor of love. That he despises the profession as much as we do and gets his jollies exposing unscrupulous characters. Oh sure it's fiction but can you doubt the truth is far away. The King of Torts like many of Grisham's novels is a story with a moral, no make that two morals. Moral one is that easy money leads to greed which leads to unscrupulous behavior, which then leads to a win at all costs mentality. Moral two I'm saving for later. Our protagonist, J Clay Carter, scoffed at the silliness of the wanton spending and bravado of the mass tort lawyers at a mass tort convention one week and two weeks later was coveting their possessions and several months later buying one expensive toy after another. This novel starts out slowly with our quasi-hero J Clay Carter, who is a Washington DC public defender, getting corraled into taking murder case of a young black male, Tequila Watson who inexplicably shot another y.b.m for no apparent reason. J. Clay Carter has been a P.D. for five years and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. This annoys the lovely Rebbecca, Clay's girlfriend of four years and her gruesome parents to no end. At one time Clay's star shone very bright as his father was a prominent DC litigator and the plan was for Clay to join him. That plan fell through when the father was about to be indicted for some offense and made a deal with an assistant Attorney General to give up the practice and leave the country. This obviously narrowed Clay's options so he become a low paid P.D. Back to Tequila Watson. As Clay looked into Tequila's case, it didn't make much sense because Tequila only had a passing acquaintance with the victim, didn't have a history of violence and he himself didn't know why he shot the victim. Tequila was on a two hour pass from an inner city drug rehab lockdown joint when the incident happened so he went their for the records and gets stonewalled. In the meantime Clay's romance hits the rocks and they break up. The next day at 5:30 in the morning Clay gets a call from a Max Pace, with an offer of a lucrative job but when he gets there Max has a different agenda. It seems he is a fireman, as in damage control, for a large drug conglomeration. It seems that this drug company was surreptitiously testing a new drug called Tarvan, which killed any addiction. Unfortunately it made killers out of five percent of the addicts. Max Pace proposed that Clay quit the Public Defenders office, take a couple of their more talented employees with him and open up his own office whereupon he was to enlist the families of these senseless random murders as clients and pay them each five million dollars for their releases.
Clay was to receive the gross figure of fifteen million. When this is complete, the mysterious Max sets Clay up for another windfall, a mammoth class action suit against another drug company. Clay jumps in and is soon joined by every major ambulance chaser in the country in a mega suit. Don't you just love it, the egomaniac sleazy lawyers in a battle to the death against the equally distasteful legal drug monopolies. As time progresses Clay's company needs to grows to accommodate the massive lawsuit, which means that they need more suits to cover the spiraling expenses. Of course Clay's accountant is worried but Clay constantly reminds him that "if you want to make it, you got to spend it". I'm sure you don't want to know the ending so I'm stopping here. Oh, and moral number two is, "Money isn't everything", although the author is fabulously rich.
Rating: 
Summary: awesome
Review: AWESOME...his best book to date!! I read some of the negative reviews here (one about the temperature accuracy in Flagstaff- give me a break!) Grisham can always create interesting desriptive characters but sometimes faulters on the plot. In this book he nailed both. I was disapointed with the Brethern and Testament but I couldn't put this book down!!! I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating Story, 2 Dimensional Characters
Review: What with all the clamoring and law-changing going on with tort laws in this country. This solid piece of Grisham writing is a painless way to learn about the greed and mechanics of class-action lawsuits, especially for those of us who received some worthless coupon. The big payoffs are for the lawyers. We follow a hard working lawyer seduced by the dark side of greed and money (where have we seen this before). Although Grisham's excellent writing and fast developing plots suck you into the story so that it flies by. Besides the main character, Clay Carter, whose motivations in abandoning the Office of the Public Defender for the lucrative lure of grabbing 30% of the settlement of a massive class action lawsuit are explored. The rest of the characters are 2 dimensional props to be moved around and interact with Clay. The relationship with his girlfriends are as stunted as the lawbooks he studied in school. Nevertheless, the highly entertaining storyline is able to partially make up this deficit. Paying the price of the hardback is not worth it, but the paperback is.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Grisham
Review: King of Torts is classic Grisham. I had to struggle with myself to continue reading initially. However, the persistence paid off when I reached a point where I could not keep it down.
A case of random killing lands on J. Clay Carter, an attorney with the Office of Public Defenders(OPD) for a meagre pay - very less than what he used to get when he used to work for his father before he got caught in an accounting scandal and the firm had to be closed down. His father now is off the coast after losing his license to practice law. Clay falls in love with Rebecca VanHorn. Rebecca's father despises Clay and so does Clay. He tries to convice Clay to take up a job with his recommendation. He refuses it and Rebecca breaks up with Clay soon after. She gets married to another guy. Meanwhile, Clay comes in contact with a "man" who offers him a lucrative deal - a deal which would make him the "King of Torts". The story goes on to how he tumbles from the throne.
Grisham establishes the characters very well.
"King of Torts" - a wonderful book. I normally prefer books and movies ending on a happy note. This one doesnt (Or may be it does - depends on whom you look at - the system or the hero?). Still I would regard this one as a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Three and a Half...
Review: This was the first Grisham book I ever read - amazing since I am in Law School and many of my classmates never shut up about him. I read this with the goal of summarizing it for a Prof. But surprisingly found myself enjoying it despite numerous legal flaws. Its the story of a poor criminal lawyer who is defending a man who killed another for no apparent reason. Enter the mysterious stranger who lets our hero in on a little secret - that a drug caused this reaction and there is a need to settle quickly and quietly... As a reward our "hero" is given a large civil class action claim against a rival drug company and the $100 million in contingency fees givers birth to the appellation The King of Torts... Then things don't go as plan for our new monarch. I read this in a few short hours and would say that it was on par with a typical movie. Nothing too brilliant but a good way to pass the time. Pick up a copy at the second hand store if you see it for a few bucks.
Rating:
Summary: Not great... but very good.
Review: This one I enjoyed, cover to cover. It is classic Grisham, and I'm glad he finally returned home to what he does best - legal thrillers. The ending is a bit lacking, i.e, the fate of Tequila Watson. I agree with others that this one has lots of potential for the big screen. If you enjoy reading Grisham, don't miss King of Torts... but try not to confuse this book with the biography of John Edwards. Ha!
Rating:
Summary: cool movie
Review: If you're looking for a good page-turner I'd recommend this book. I found the lead character likeable, and his ride to riches, fun and exciting. The story whooshed along like a cool movie you can't take your eyes off. (I kept seeing Charlie Sheen as Carter). I wish Grisham gave this book a little more substance and suspense towards the end so I could give it more than 3 stars, but it still was a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Hi $ Oppty--Some Legal Knldge Req'd
Review: "King of Torts" gives in fiction form a primer on the difference between tort law practice and mass tort boiler room scam practice. In the former, a victim of corporate wrongdoing is compensated, either through a verdict after a trial or an out-of-court settlement. In the latter, fast buck operators who've passed the bar exam contact thousands of victims promising a settlement to them if they will join their plaintiff class. They then come to a settlement with the offending company, take out a huge cut for themselves, and split up the paltry remains among their thousands of "clients". The focus is not justice or law or compassion, but fast profit, almost as if the class of victims were a block of stock options to be exercised at the most opportune moment.
Clay Carter, Grisham's protagonist, never takes a case to trial, seldom even sees the inside of a courtroom. Instead, his resources are poured into advertising for victims to enlarge his plaintiff classes, and into the trappings of wealth to show his prospective clients that he has pulled off big scores in the past. After they sign with him, his client/victims get a couple of phone calls, a perfunctory medical exam, and a few months later, a check that is woefully low in light of what they have suffered.
The companies that are the targets of Carter's assaults are crippled financially, sometimes driven into backruptcy, throwing thousands out of work. In one case this results in some painful retaliation on Carter, which is satisfying enough to the casual reader. But to those who read this to gain a greater understanding of the diseased tort law system, the ray of hope seems to be personified in the lawyer who steps in toward the end of the story to form a plaintiff class of Carter's dead or dying former clients. A plan is formed to sue him for a crime that seems to be all too rarely prosecuted: legal malpractice.
Not being a lawyer, I can't tell how realistic the circumstances underpinning this tale are. The dollar amounts seem high, but then the normal fee for a normal lawyer seems high to me. If Grisham's hyperbole in "King of Torts" is only minor, then he has done the public a service in illuminating a serious public problem.
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