Runway Jury, is the more traditional Grisham, but a nifty suspense-filled story. I really enjoyed it. Lawyers will hate it, as it portrays them as terrible blood-sucking-win-at-any-cost malevolent characters. Fortunately, in this novel they get their due. In this novel Grisham dissects the tobacco industry. Given the absolutely stunning amount of money involved in the recent class action suits against the tobacco companies, Grisham starts with the assumption, a quite reasonable one, that the industry lawyers will stop at nothing to prevent a decision going against them and they set aside a huge slush fund to pay for all sorts of dirty tricks.
Someone else decides to manipulate the jury results to their own profit (there’s a not unpredictable link to the anit-smokers involved, but what they do with the money is really nifty even if I didn’t quite understand how they did it). Soon the corporate lawyers are being sucked into a scheme they can’t control but think they might be able to manipulate. In the meantime they are sublty, and not so secretly, attempting to influence the jurors to their way of thinking.
Grisham knows how to write courtroom drama and this book has some of his best.
