Rating: 
Summary: Old hat
Review: About a 31-year-old lawyer. Act 1: poor, ill-paid, but honest, still with "ideals" (fading, however, and with a lot of inner grunting about it) about his profession. Act 2: greed, easy money (lots of it), lavish spending it. Act 3: punishment (bankruptcy) and repentment, with the added but undesired bonus of an inflicted bilateral leg fracture and brain concussion (it does have a cathartic value). This is a re-hash, concerning the legal profession, of what A.J. Cronin gave us in 1937, with "The Citadel" about the medical one (be it known that I AM a doctor of medicine...), the only differences are in what money can buy in 2,000 a.D. and what it could buy in the '30's. However, Mr Grisham's description, with his inside knowledge, of the lawyers' arrogance, invasiveness, deviousness, greed and corruptness and being just hot-air balloons is always delectable and is worth the price of the book. Buy it to enjoy this description, it's the book's only redeeming feature and it justifies its still too-high price. Better to wait for the paperback edition, however. Mr Grisham had us used to much better stuff coming from his pen.
Rating: 
Summary: Heard any good lawyer jokes lately? How about stories?
Review: 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. When it comes to the law, I can't seem to get over the hump. I'm like the guy walking around with his personal rain cloud 12 inches above his head.
It doesn't matter which side of an issue I'm on, or how strong my case is, I seem to be on the wrong side. No matter how bullet proof my case seems to be the law twists it around and makes it weak. And of course my attorney, whom I thought to be a brilliant, eloquent tactician turns out to be Elmer Fudd in disguise. Beware of people that get injured while setting a fire to your house, they will get a lawyer or two and sue. 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". If you don't want to know the ending, stop right here Well Clay goes on to be recognized as a rising superstar lawyer while Rebecca gets married and Clay brings a gorgeous model, Ridley, to the wedding reception and then takes up with her. but things are just not right. Clay misses Rebecca terribly and the lawfirm has grown to fast and pretty soon the house of cards is falling apart. At Max's urging Clay takes on giant manufacturer Goffman(sounds like Johnson and Johnson), which turns out to be Clay's first big mistake. They're a tough nut to crack and the beginning of the end for Clay's law firm In the end Clay gets his girl back and like the protagonists in his other novels, gives up law and rides off into the sunset, which is kind of what the author John Grisham has done. Oh, and moral number two is, "Money isn't everything", although the author is fabulously rich.
Rating:
Summary: More predictable than his other works
Review: The King of Torts starts out with a compelling story about a lawyer who is determined to be his own man, but quickly falls into a predictable tale of compromising your ethics to make a fast buck. The last 200 or so pages predictably depict the rise and fall of a greedy personal injury lawyer on a mass scale. I kept reading waiting for the twist that Grisham often puts in his novels, but was left wanting in the end. I really enjoyed his earlier works, including the non-legal ones, and hope that Grisham once again takes a chance in his writing with twists and turns to keep the reader interested.
Rating:
Summary: Grisham - The king of the great start
Review: Grisham's novels always start out great, but end up leaving me vaguely dissatisfied. The King of Torts was no exception. The first half of this book is some of his best writing yet, the second half isn't even worth reading. It's as if the author just gave up half way through. I do not recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: The King of Torts
Review: The Grisham formula has become too predictable. This book follows the familiar lawyer is tempted by something too good to be true, rises to fame and falls to failure within the pages. The characters aren't very endearing and the ending is weak. This book can be a "beach book" since it doesn't require a lot of concentration or involvement to read.
Rating:
Summary: Greed, Envy.. What a Great Book
Review: After waiting a few months to get my hands on a copy of this book, I was not disappointed in the least. The last John Grisham book I read was The Runaway Jury and there were parts in The King of Torts that reminded me of that book.
The book begins with Clay Carter, a lawyer working in the Office of the Public Defender (OPD). He is quickly assigned a case to provide legal counsel to a murderer. He tries to pawn the case off on another lawyer, but he's unsucessful in doing so. He soon gets a call from Max Pace, who seems to have the perfect case but all he needs is a good lawyer. Clay takes on the case and makes millions. Max happens to have more and more cases, each guaranteeing millions, but a what cost? After living in the lap of luxury, Clay realizes that it has all be at the expense of his clients.
This book was such a fast paced read. Whether you're a John Grisham fan or not, any suspense fan would love this book.
Rating:
Summary: THE KING OF TORTS
Review: John Grisham is loosing interest in his writing; it shows in his skill and recent style of writing. This book goes down with his other bomb, "The Brethren!" I have fourteen of his books resting in my book-case and I just don't feel that his desire is writing legal suspense stories any longer. The first half of The King Of Torts is a page-turner as he develops the characters. I read it quickly while on the plane from Los Angeles to Lima Peru. A trip I made by the way because of an interest in South America that was stirred up by his earlier book, "The Testament." The next half of the book was very preachy like reading an editorial from the Sunday newspaper. There was no excitement. I was sitting poolside in Palm Springs, soaking sun and enjoying the people watching much more than The King Of Torts. Although, it was a good conversation starter when other Grisham fans came over to me to discuss if I like his new book. I finished the last few chapters while serving my civic duty sitting waiting to be picked for a panel on Jury duty. I don't know what was worse, just sitting there bored, or reading the ending to this book. If you like legal thrillers don't look to this book this year. Pick up "First Degree" by David Rosenfelt. Here is a fresh new author who will have you tearing through the pages not believing your eyes as the suspense of the story "FIRST DEGREE" unfolds.
Rating: 
Summary: HORRIBLE!!!
Review: This was the first John Grisham novel I read and I expected more from what I have heard about John Grisham. The plot was horrible and it just dragged on to the predictable and rushed end. Do not even bother with this piece of trash that got accidentally published. I wish I could give this novel zero stars but I cannot. Blah!!! I will use this book for starting a fire in my fireplace. Awful. Disgusting. Horrible. What was Doubleday thinking? So much for "commercial publishers only publish good novels!" FILTH!!!
Rating:
Summary: Worked the first time...
Review: This is more a moral fable than a thriller... Easy to read, you finish it very fast but not 'cause of the fast pace but because the plot is very very easy. In fact the book has three episodes very similar one to the other: once you've read the first one, the other ones are variations on the same topic, making the terrain ready for the big and very predictable crash of the main character since the tenth page. At the end, you don't have the sensation of having pass through a great and creative plot, but a soft ride in some park: just above plain boring, enough to be finished and take another novel without a second thought about this one. "The firm" or "The client" or "The jury" are very far away now.
Rating:
Summary: Rather Well done
Review: As a movie producer I'm always looking for good thrillers and of course I need to read Grisham. Yes, he uses the same formula over and over, but it does seem to work for the most part. He must have helpers, though. Nobody can churn out the words as he does.
Still it is well done.
Also recommend ...FOR YOUR PENANCE....
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