The fact that nearly every dollar in a trial lawyer's wallet came from obtaining injured individuals the justice they otherwise would have been denied by our system is somehow lost in all the hooting about expensive haircuts. Witness the sniping at Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, a millworker's son who earned much of his considerable personal fortune trying horrific medical malpractice cases. Big business and its allies in the Republican Party have spent decades so successfully vilifying 'trial lawyers' as legal vultures and social parasites that the two words virtually have become an epithet. The latter might prove a tougher sell than the former. Grisham has set himself an interesting task in The Appeal - to explore the malevolent influence of moneyed special interests on our electoral system and to rehabilitate the social standing of trial lawyers. Further, in this presidential election year, it's a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system's real failings than you're likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists. The Appeal is his 20th novel, and it's as angry, dark and urgent a piece of social realism as you're likely to find on the best-seller lists any time soon. He's an idealist but not an optimist a moralist but not a moralizer. That's a shame in Grisham's case because no other writer of his popularity is quite so keen-eyed or as fierce a social critic. In the world of popular fiction, those sorts of numbers not only put you beyond the reach of conventional criticism but also obscure any purpose but brute commerce. Grisham remains the only author to have written a novel that topped the best-seller lists for seven consecutive years. He belongs to an elite group of authors who have sold out first printings of 2 million volumes. People who keep track of such things report that Grisham was the best-selling author of the 1990s, when readers bought more than 60 million of his books.

The Appeal by John Grisham