Rating: 
Summary: Greedy lawyers? Say it ain't so, John!
Review: THE KING OF TORTS is less a thriller than a cautionary tale.Clay Carter is a young lawyer slaving for peanuts with the Washington D.C. Office of the Public Defender. Clay once had a promising career with his father's high powered law firm until the Old Man had to give up his law license and retire to the Bahamas after he and his accountant were caught cooking the books. At least the latter had the good grace to commit suicide. Carter is such a loser with no prospects that the snooty parents of his girlfriend, Rebecca, arrange a break-up and her subsequent marriage to an affluent "worm". Things unexpectedly turn around for Clay when he's approached by the mysterious Max Pace, a "fireman" hired by big companies to do damage control on faulty products before they're exposed before juries that are likely to grant crushing monetary awards to victimized consumers. In this case, Pace's client is a major pharmaceutical company which wants Carter to stage manage an out-of-court settlement with the families of a dozen or so drug addicts irreparably harmed by the company's anti-addiction medication. For a paltry few millions of dollars, the relatives are bought off, and Clay himself pockets a couple mil. Max continues to provide Carter with similar opportunities, and the latter is soon one of those legal sharks specializing in mass torts that extort millions (and billions) from major corporations in class action settlements without ever going to trial. In THE KING OF TORTS, the emphasis is on greed with a capital "G". The philosophy of the mass tort shyster is "Find 'em, sign 'em, settle 'em, take the money and run". At first, you might think the book is a judgmental morality play by author-lawyer John Grisham. But, except that the author seems to hold such lawyers in low esteem for rarely practicing law in an actual courtroom and for the pure greed of their modus operandi, he also appears to regard such bottom dwellers as a useful break on the excesses of corporate America. His portrayal of Carter is decidedly sympathetic, and the reader can't but like the character. Clay's generous to a fault with the employees of the private law firm that he establishes; he continues to care deeply about Rebecca; he takes good care of his exiled Dad. As tens of millions of dollars in fees pour in, Carter also spend millions - on homes, a yacht, a private jet, a Porsche, and a Trophy Girlfriend/Model named Ridley. Early on, you realize that Carter's bubble is going to eventually burst, and the fun of the book is anticipating how this is going to come about. And when the two FBI agents walk into his office one day, you can't but mutter "Uh, oh". Since Clay is basically a decent guy, one can perhaps rationalize his 17-month dalliance with self-destruction as something the Devil made him do. Indeed, Pace, dressed in black jeans, black T-shirt, and black pointed-toe boots the first time he meets our hero, could credibly be regarded as representing Evil. THE KING OF TORTS is not a white-knuckle thriller, but it is great good fun, especially if you're the CEO of a company that's been taken to the wash.
Rating: 
Summary: Just don't understand . . .
Review: Personally, I thought this was one of John Grisham's best works, so I'm a little taken aback at some of the negative reviews. My favorite all-time Grisham is "The Firm," but "King" follows a close second. I'm not sure about some of the "facts" but I do know that Mr. Grisham writes compelling characters, plots, and settings, and has few equals. Would also recommend another great read, though along totally different lines: "The Bark of the Dogwood" by J.T. McCrae.
Rating:
Summary: THOROUGHLY ENJOYABLE!
Review: Not usually one to disappoint, Mr. Grisham has captured his audience once again by giving his readers a glimpse into the lawyer's world of mass tort/litigation. In this tale he creates the engaging Clay Carter, a young lawyer who spends his days toiling away for pennies in the Public Defender's office, defending the poor and downtrodden. By night he romances the lovely Rebecca, his girlfriend of many years who works as a congressional aide but secretly longs for the career of her mother (shopping and charity luncheons). The truth is, Clay does not measure up to the expectations of Rebecca's very rich family...and eventually Clay's apparent lack of desire to better his career and as a result his finances proves fatal to their relationship. Then, out of nowhere Clay is approached by a stranger to discuss
possible litigation involving a pharmaceutical giant--and a bad drug. Hence, he is introduced to the world of mass torts, greedy lawyers, personal jets and more money than he'd ever dreamed... True Grisham fans will find this to be a real page-turner, as Clay learns that nothing comes without a price............. DYB
Rating:
Summary: One of the best
Review: I recall in the movie "Wall Street" Micheal Douglas's speech to his employees on Greed. This book is the followup on that speech. Grisham has spent a lot of time in research to get unmentionable's from a lot of Lawyers,Brokers,and Entrepreneur's. This story tells it all,and could be unbelievable to some. It is highly factual to the workings of the world. I will go a long way to find another great novel to read.This writing potrays it all. I highly recommend it, along with all his other writings.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbelievable characters, questionable "facts"
Review: It's readable, like all of Grisham's stuff, but the characters, the protagonist in particular, are just passive foils for his arguments, in this case about class actions. Worse is Grisham's evident contempt for his audience. The least an author can do is get his facts right. On p. 406 Grisham writes about a trial in Flagstaff, Arizona: "It was the second week in September, the temperature already pushing 105." But it has never, ever been that hot in Flagstaff, which is nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. The highest ever recorded there was 97 degrees, and that was in July. The typical high temperature in mid-September in Flagstaff is 70 degrees, about the same as Washington, D.C., where most of the novel takes place (and where the temperature has indeed reached as high as 106). Maybe this is the only factual error in this long long book, but if an author can get so obvious and easily checkable a fact wrong, how can one have any confidence in anything else he writes? In a real novel, with believable people, this might be overlooked, but in an extensive legal brief like this one, it's a serious drawback.
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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: Complete waste of money and time
Review: Like reviewers before me, I was completely disappointed in this book. Thankfully, I found it on the discount table at my local bookstore so I spent very little money on this horrible Grisham tale. Perhaps Grisham is too busy lately to actually put any real effort into crafting a plot line that captures the reader. I will think twice from now on before picking up anything by this author.
Rating: 
Summary: Incredibly disappointing!
Review: I am a fan of Grisham and have been for many many years. This book, however, is so full of holes that I was amazed that I was reading something by the same author that wrote a 'masterpieces' such as "The Firm."
Clay Carter is an overworked public defender, having worked five years in the Washington, D.C. public defender's office. He is suddenly offered the chance to earn a quick $10million by persuading victims' families to accept a no-questions-asked $5million rather than suing a pharmaceutical company. He is then offered a second, larger case through which he earns $100million. Then things fall apart with the third case.
I did not care for the main character at all and while that happens sometimes in books, usually it is a device to prove a moral. In this case, I didn't like him because he did things that no lawyer with any intelligence (and supposedly this Carter is intelligent) would do. For example, he performs some insider trading without blinking an eye. The whole set-up for this to happen was ridiculous.
Secondly, I guess I was supposed to feel something for him and his girlfriend. They break up, she gets married, and I guess I was supposed to wish for them to get back together and/or to feel sorry for Carter. I didn't do either mainly because there was absolutely nothing written to show that they even cared about each other, with the exception of some stereotypical sexual encounters - she in particular came off as nothing more than a spoiled rich girl.
All in all, this is the absolute worse book by Grisham I have read and I have to say that I would not recommend this one to anyone unless they are truly diehard Grisham fans.
Rating:
Summary: The King Of Torts
Review: The King Of Torts by John Grisham is a great novel full of suspense. A man named Clay is the main character. He is a lawyer who doesn't make much money. One day, a man named Max Pace offered him millions of dollars to file law suits against different companies. One was making medicine to relieve artheritis pain but a side affect that the public didnt know about was that it creates tumors in the bladder. Some of them are cancerous and others are not. After Clay's first case was over, he bought himself a new car and house and much more.
The King of torts is an awesome book and everyone should read it at least once in their lifetime. So if your searching for a good book, read The King Of Torts by John Grisham.
Rating:
Summary: What comes up must come down.
Review: John Grisham returns with from his string of non-legal novels with The King of Torts. This novel quickly puts him back on top of the author world. In the book, we find a young public defender named Clay, who is given the opportunity to earn 15 million dollars with just a few months's work. Soon enough, he is thrown into the world of mass litigation, where lawyers sue big corportations with thousands of claims. The millions start pouring in and Clay soon finds himself at the top of his game. While Clay is on top, he becomes so obssessed with money and fame that he becomes a character you will despise. It's hard to like someone who's complaining about life when they own a yacht, a million dollar house, a penthouse, and their own $45 million jet. But what goes up must come down, a thing Clay does not seem to know. Halfway through the story, Clay realizes that he's in way over his head. When his downfall arrives, it's hard to feel sympathy for Clay. While the story is fairly predictable, it is still a good read. The plot flows very well and can be finished by many in one sitting. Though not his best, I would still recommend this novel.
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