Gray Mountain

Grisham is sort of hit or miss for me. I'm not really into legal thrillers, but as far as legal thrillers go, this was a good one. Grisham really hammers home the horrific details of how Big Coal conducts business, and the rock and a hard place that the poverty-stricken miners and people in Appalachia have are put in daily between testing their love for the land that surrounds their little towns and the desperate need for the jobs offered by the mining industry–and all the ramifications that come with them.

Grisham is no slouch when it comes to prose, but after so many books, he has a definite beat-sheet, and you can feel him writing to it. When the “big twist” happens about 65% of the way through the book, you might be a little surprised, but the second it happens, you know EXACTLY how the rest of the book will proceed. And it does.

I liked this book, but found myself raging at the world during parts of it because we, as people, should not treat our fellow human beings the way some folks in this book get treated. Unfortunately, that's not a writer stretching the truth. It was born out of a writer stating plain, hard truths that we don't care to always acknowledge.