6-15-08, 10:03 am

The Appeal By John Grisham New York: Doubleday, 2008

John Grisham's latest thriller, The Appeal, is chilling. Corporate polluters attempt to buy a seat on Mississippi's State Supreme Court in order to overturn a jury verdict that has awarded victims of the company's negligent actions millions of dollars. The award threatens to erase billions of dollars from the stock portfolio of one of the wealthiest men in the country. Something has to be done. No expense and no right-wing slogan railing against liberal values and judicial activists is spared to overturn the jury's decision.

To go back to the beginning. Krane Chemical had moved to Bowmore, Mississippi to take advantage of the state's lack of labor laws and its loose enforcement of environmental protections. The company had produced dangerous carcinogens as a by-product of its operations. To save money and boost its profit margins, the company dumped the waste in the ground, often without even making the gesture of putting it into containers first.

Soon the local town's water supply took on a weird odor and then many different colors. After residents complained, local officials were influenced to pronounce the water safe to drink and federal government studies were delayed or falsified – until people began to die from cancer. Within a few years, the county earned the nickname 'Cancer County,' achieving the highest rate of cancer in the country.

And the residents got angry and sued.

It isn't easy or cheap to run up against lawyers for a wealthy out-of-state corporation, but Mary Grace and Wes Payton put everything on the line to win the case. Their clients are mostly poor people trying to survive in a town that has long been abandoned by businesses and residents due to the water. So the Paytons mortgage everything to be able to afford the investigators and experts needed to win the case.

And they do win. The jury, angered by obvious corporate lies and blatant abuses of their neighbors, returns with a record verdict.

Suddenly the forces of right-wing reaction in league with corporate interests and 'tort reformers' are worried that more scrutiny of corporate actions and enforcement of environmental protections will cut into profit margins. They threaten to leave the state to seek easy markets elsewhere. In fact, when the lawsuits were filed Krane Chemical moved out of the country altogether to find a place where it could pursue the same actions with impunity. It closed down the plant and fired the workers without much notice or severance compensation.

The billionaire who owns controlling interest in Krane is not about to pay a dime of the jury's award and is uninterested in settling with the hundreds of people his company's actions have damaged. He's got a different plan: buy a seat on the state Supreme Court that will hear the appeal of the lawsuit and have decision overturned. That will show these small-town Mississippians who's the boss.

Will big money and corporate power overwhelm the people of Bowmore, Mississippi and the people who worked to defend their interests? Or will people power win justice in the end?

Grishman's work is at its best in this fine new novel, showing why he keeps his top place on the best-seller lists.