Reviewed by: Jonathan Rayner
Author: John Grisham
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 978-1-444-72970-2
Price: £19.99

Meet Oscar Finley, the lawyer who found a way to lose a no-fault divorce that was uncontested on all issues. His incensed client, a Mrs Vallie Pennebaker, beat him up so badly he needed 14 stitches.

Finley is one of the leading characters in John Grisham’s latest novel, The Litigators. Grisham has been criticised for writing to a formula, but this is a departure - the novel is genuinely funny.

Finley’s partner is one Wally Figg, a sometimes recovering alcoholic who carries a pistol in his briefcase and advertises the firm’s services on bingo cards and other unusual mass media. Together with AC, the dog and the office manager, they make up the ‘boutique’ firm of Finley & Figg, whose ‘scam was hustling injury cases’.

AC is short for Ambulance Chaser, by the way. The dog’s acute hearing means it can hear ambulance sirens long before the human ear. It has been trained to alert the partners so they can arrive at the scene of a road traffic accident before their - equally seedy - competitors.

It is into this firm that Harvard law school graduate David Zinc washes up. He is drunk and confused, but more importantly he is a refugee from ‘five years of savage labour with colleagues he loathed’ at a big commercial law practice in downtown Chicago.

Zinc was previously earning $300,000 a year, but decides to throw in his lot with Finley & Figg. He reasons that he will at least now get home in the evenings with the energy to begin starting a family, which he duly does.

The firm becomes involved in a class action against big pharma in the shape of Varrick, a company that has fought many bruising battles in the courts and paid out billions in compensation. Figg and his clients anticipate a lucrative settlement, but Varrick does not always lose and this time it is determined to counter-attack.

Enter the delectable Nadine Karros, upon whom ‘all eyes feasted’ and who set Figg to ‘drooling’ as she mounted a defence of Varrick’s drug ‘Krayoxx’. She is a star litigator at the firm from which Zinc had escaped and, from her career record of winning cases, looks likely to eat Finley & Figg alive.

The Litigators is a good read and by no means without a serious side. There is a sub-pot involving the lead poisoned child of illegal immigrants which, although sad, shows that big business can act with humanity. And even the lawyer in the case, Zinc, emerges with his ethics untainted.

The Litigators is published by Hodder & Stoughton and will be available in hardback from the end of October 2011.

Jonathan Rayner is a reporter at the Gazette

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