American justice system is basis for taut thriller

1:18pm Friday 14th March 2008

JOHN Grisham's 20th novel, The Appeal (published in hardback by Century, £18.99) sees him returning to the legal thriller genre.

The story starts after a major trial in Mississippi. Jeannette Baker, who lost her husband and son to cancer caused by chemical pollution, sues Krane Chemical Corporation, the company which had contaminated the water in her small town of Bowsmore.

The jury has found the company guilty, ordering it to pay $41m dollars in damages. Naturally, Krane files an appeal, which would be heard by the Mississippi Crown Court whose justices would either approve or reverse the verdict.

The corporation is owned by billionaire Carl Trudeau, a shrewd businessman and Wall Street predator, who is convinced he will not win the appeal before the existing panel of judges. With judicial elections coming up, he decides to buy a seat on the court bench for his own appointee.

He spends $8m to hire a secretive specialist firm run by Machiavellian Barry Rinehart, who decides to target and replace Justice Sheila McCarthy, a divorcee with a moderate voting record. Ron Fisk, a white, handsome, clean-cut, church-going lawyer with no judicial experience, is persuaded to stand against her.

The main part of the story is the marketing of Fisk and the aggressive dirty tricks campaign against McCarthy, who is caricatured as a raging liberal, soft on criminals and issues such as pro-gay marriage.

Can McCarthy, who only has a modest campaign account, and Jeannette's attorneys, local trial lawyers Wes and Mary Grace Peyton, thwart the ruthless tycoon?

This book offers a dark look into the heart of American justice. The most controversial issue is whether private money should be used in electing judicial officials.

As a former practising trial lawyer in Mississippi, as well as a member of the state legislature, it is something Grisham is concerned about.

The Appeal is a powerful, engrossing and timely tale and will certainly open readers eyes to what goes on behind the scenes of American's legal and political elections.

I enjoyed it until I reached the ending. However realistic it might be, it's ultimately sad and disheartening, and I wonder if it was Grisham's intention to make the reader feel a sense of outrage at the way the system works? I would have preferred the feelgood factor with which his books usually leave the reader.

Laura Wurzal ✍ ✍ ✍ Matter by Iain M Banks (published in hardback by Orbit, priced £18.99) sees the author back in his Culture science fiction setting, which comes as a surprise, partly because he has not set a book there since 2000's Look To Windward, which even at the time felt like a farewell.

In addition, his well-publicised opposition to the Iraq war seemed likely to sit uneasily with the stories' core concept - the Culture is an advanced intergalactic civilisation, which feels a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than itself; the interventions can be shadowy, often have a terrible cost in the short term, and do not exclude regime change, but always, ultimately, are seen to come from good intentions and to be worthwhile in the long run.

His reconciliation of this dilemma, as we should have expected, is ingenious.

His stand-ins for George W Bush and company are not the benevolent Culture, but the Oct - creatures of twisted syntax, shadowy aims and a terrible tendency to read the evidence according to what they would like to find.

Which is not to suggest that Matter is straight political satire; the Oct may function as a critique of US interventionism, but the planet with which they meddle is pure sense of wonder SF; a "shellworld"

composed of concentric spheres, each inhabited by different races and constructed eons past by aliens impressive even to the Culture.

Through this setting (and the surrounding galaxy) our protagonists romp in an occasionally comical adventure. These strands intertwine as satisfactorily as one would expect from a writer of Banks' gifts, and even the infodumps, which can put some readers off SF, are delivered in such deft prose as to be a joy.

Whether Matter reveals Banks's political stance is debatable, but thankfully, polemic argument has not been allowed enough rein to obscure the undoubted talents of our greatest living SF writer.

Alex Sarll