The Appeal

The book follows two stories side by side. The Paytons have nearly bankrupted themselves fighting the case, and they now wait anxiously for the appeal while living in a small apartment. Meanwhile, consultants hand-pick an earnest young lawyer, Ron Fisk, who has no idea who is really behind his campaign, and run a slick operation full of attack ads and wedge issues.

Grisham clearly wrote this book to make a point about the role of money in judicial elections, and the details of the campaign are chilling in their plausibility. The human stories, especially the families harmed by the pollution and Fisk's slow realisation of what he has become part of, give the argument emotional force.

Readers expecting a traditional happy ending may be frustrated, as the conclusion is deliberately bleak. Some characters are drawn in black and white to serve the message. Still, it is one of Grisham's most thought-provoking novels. The courtroom scenes are brief and the cast is large, but the backroom politics are the real drama, and Grisham paces them like a thriller, cutting between the two camps as the election day approaches. About 358 pages in the Doubleday hardcover.