As said in an earlier review, I love the John Grisham books. But this was something else. This book is filled with truths to what money can do to you and people’s minds. It has a story that keeps you reading, not wanting to stop and a beautiful ending.
❤️

The first thing which should be pointed out is that this isn't a "legal thriller" and no one's life is in danger at any point. This is one of Grisham's "preachy" novels about greed and abuses in the US tort law system and how a particularly greedy lawyer is caught in his own trap. Mostly predictable stuff, neither good nor bad nor particularly painful to get through, the perfect thing to kill a long plane trip if you REALLY have nothing better to read.

How to write thoughts without giving spoilers?
We take a young lawyer working at the OPD office - toss him the case of a lifetime and he becomes the King of Torts. But take anyone making $35k a year and give them 100 million and bad decisions will follow so we follow his rise and the aftermath.

Most everything about this book you could see coming 200 pages ahead of time
but
Grisham is such a great writer that he even makes a flawed book enjoyable.

Good characters and good pacing with a paperthin predictable plot makes this average out to a 3 star book.

Grisham has been one of my "go to" entertainment sources during this pandemic - always a good read.

So this is the second time I'm reading this and I flew through it. I recently read another courtroom drama and thought maybe I wasn't into them anymore but then read this and had forgotten how much I enjoy Grisham. He's so smooth and easy to understand even with all the legal jargon. He's makes a difficult to understand topic easy for the common layman. I raised my rating from 2 stars to 3 stars. Even though I flew through it and enjoyed it, I couldn't give it a higher rating because of the ending. I was fine with how it all played out, however I wanted more. Where did he go from here? What is he going to do now? I wanted at least a hint of the direction Clays life would be going, but didn't get it. It was left open, and that irritated me. Overall, I'd still recommend Grisham to anyone who likes reading about the law. I have a stack of Grisham's I found at a library sale I was gonna give to my mother, but decided I'd read them again real quick because it had been years since I've picked one up. This one was the first I choose. A nice piece of brain candy to get you through the heavier books.

Impossível não adorar cada história escrita por John Grisham e esta não foi exceção
Adorei! Esperava outro final para o Clay e acreditei até ao fim que tudo ia correr bem...
mas, como é habitual, quase todas as personagens principais acabam relativamente bem.
Next!

A really lousy book: rags to riches to rags, the end!

We've read every Grisham offering, including his two non-legal- thrillers, and find most of his novels to be good or great, a couple just so-so. For the first time, we'd rate this one at the bottom of the barrel. It has virtually no plot: a down-trodden public defender falls for a get-rich-quick scheme involving settling a few cases with some murder victims (due to bad drugs), for which our hero, Clay Carter earns like $15 million. Getting the hang of mass tort class action suits, Carter scores a second time, nabbing some $100M in fees! Soon he's living at a $1-2 million per month {!!} pace, complete with Porsche, hired model-bimbo, villa in the Caribbean, private jet, etc. His efforts to land a third big score suddenly fail, then his second case starts to backfire, and by the end of the book, which just goes away with little fanfare, he's declaring bankruptcy and going away to hide.

Grisham does manage to generate a little suspense with the two or three big middle cases, but when the last big one fails, he doesn't even share with us readers a shard of logic to explain it, leaving us not merely feeling hollow, but feeling cheated by all the time we spent reading this junque. The point of the whole book eludes us, unless it's really just an attack against tort lawyers -- a group easy to hate based on the goings-on herein.

Speaking of money, we probably don't want to know what Grisham earned for this outing, but in some minds, he seems as guilty of cheating as his hero inside the covers. Don't "Skip Christmas" -- SKIP THIS!!!

I wanted some light reading and all I got was utter boredom. What a complete waste of time. The book's only redeeming quality (if you can call it that) was that I didn't want to put it away because part of me wanted to know whether I had surmised its ending correctly. Unfortunately, I had.

My first Grisham book and tbh, I am really disappointed, expected so much more from a book called "The King of Torts". Didn't realize the title is supposed to be sarcastic.

I am so mad with the main character. He did nothing by himself. He just did exactly what his mysterious advisor (Max Pace) told him to do, nothing more. Max provides insider information that allowed Clay to make a fortune on the back of innocent people. Then being as stupid and greedy as he is, he got beaten up and lost it all in the end.

I also didn't enjoy the writing style. I was simply given information. Show me, don't tell me. Clay started working non stop in his office. What exactly was he doing when he had a group of people to get it all done? Clay couldn't stop thinking about Rebecca. What was he thinking of? Why does he "love" her that much (readers couldn't get to know her at all)?

Not to mention the fact that every single man in this book considered women as pretty objects that can be used for sex, that was so annoying and disgusting.

I may try few other books by this author some day, I am not judging him over one single book, however, I am not impressed at all for the time being.

I read almost all of Grisham’s novels about ten or fifteen years ago and this one in particular stuck with me. Indeed, every time I see a ‘Survivors of Camp Lejeune’ or mesothelioma commercial advising sufferers to call the toll-free number on their screen, I thank Grisham for allowing me to see the nefarious greed at work behind glorified ambulance chasers who are thus preying on people’s real problems. There is a reason lawyers do not have a very high appreciation in society as a whole, and a large part of this is due to operations of those who operate ‘torts’: class-action lawsuits aimed at getting large corporations to settle with multiple clients injured by their actions.

As always, this fundamental social criticism is developed by Grisham with a range of characters representing the gamut from idealistic, hardworking and unselfish individuals to totally nefarious conmen who are out to put one over on whomever they can shake down for a profit. Grisham’s protagonist here seems to move from one end of this spectrum to the other and then, at least potentially, back again, making for a heightened sense of engagement for the reader as one realizes what a slippery slope multimillion dollar cash payouts represent to those tempted by the good things in life. The symbol of one’s private Gulfstream jet being the ultimate exemplar of a tort lawyer’s success really hit home.

Again, Grisham uses a budding romance to keep his reader’s interest. Here, it involves a potential father-in-law whose shady land dealings are despised by the protagonist, a setup for a cushy Washington position, a parental injunction to break off relations, a forced marriage, and eventual disenchantment and family estrangement and (surprise! surprise!) a reconciliation of the lovers. Grisham has seen more than one Hollywood romantic drama.

But it is his riveting dissection of this particular subset of the legal profession that knocks this novel’s ball out of the park: it is a masterful indictment of the manner in which a system designed to protect and help those who have been grievously mistreated can be irretrievably corrupted by those who purport to be altruistic benefactors when they are in fact ambulance-chasers overcome with megalomania.

Highly recommended.

A big pharmaceutical company creates a drug that cures addiction, it is 90% effective and only 2 percent of the people in the study relapse, and go back to life on the street. Sounds great right? Here's the problem, in the remaining 8% it creates an overwhelming, and apparently irresistible desire to kill. This seemed like an implausible plot, even for a John Grisham book.

3 Stars. I enjoyed Clay Carter's wild roller-coaster ride. Worth the read. Yet I could sense the outcome, even some of the details. Grisham is one great writer, and this hasn't happened before. "Why?" I believe it has to do with the lack of sympathy the public has for mass tort attorneys, and their huge percentages. Putting them in a positive light wasn't to be expected! Clay has been 5 years in the D.C. public defender's office, struggling to do his best for clients against the torrent of cases, poor pay, and a lack of respect, especially from his potential in-laws, Barb and Bennett Van Horn, Rebecca's parents. He can't stand being in the same state as Bennett, a pompous and questionable land developer. A strange murder case comes Clay's way. Tequila Watson, a young, indigent man, was released from a drug rehab centre, quickly found a gun, and shot almost the first person he saw. Clay discovered that Tequila had been receiving an experimental drug with such a side effect for up to 8% of users. Soon he is a tort lawyer suing the manufacturer on behalf of victims. It's not long before Clay's fees total $130 million and he's become the King of Torts. Then the problems start. (September 2021)

My first John Grisham experience and maybe my last. Did not enjoy this book.

I did learn some things about Tort but I could have googled it and learn the same in 5 minutes without having to read this book.