The setting is Bowmore, Miss., where Krane Chemical Co. has been illegally dumping chemical waste for years. As a result, Bowmore's drinking water has become contaminated, and "the rate of cancer was fifteen times the national average," in a plotline that echoes Jonathan Harr's Woburn-based "A Civil Action." A widow sues Krane in state court and, with the help of a husband-and-wife attorney team, wins a damage award of $41 million. Krane's Manhattan-based CEO, Carl Trudeau, remains defiant: "I swear to you on my mother's grave that not one dime of Krane's money will ever be touched by those ignorant people," he tells his defeated legal team.
Krane appeals the initial court decision, and Trudeau decides to secretly invest several million dollars in litigation "insurance": He pays a mysterious consultant named Barry Rinehart to make sure Krane wins its legal appeal. Rinehart tells Trudeau that the elected Mississippi Supreme Court is deeply divided and that one supportive judge would make all the difference - "We target a supreme court justice who is not particularly friendly, and we take him, or her, out of the picture." Rinehart finds a pliable candidate, a clean-cut and church-going attorney named Ron Fisk, then organizes his campaign against an incumbent "liberal judge" named Sheila McCarthy. Needless to say, the campaign is both well funded and filled with dirty tricks.
Grisham is clearly fed up with how big money tends to control political races. The long campaign he so engagingly describes is a mixture of character assassination, breathtaking hypocrisy, mudslinging ads, and backroom fraudulence. In other words, Grisham offers a sadly familiar picture of today's political scene.
