Gray Mountain

John Grisham

2014 • 386 pages

Ratings29

Average rating3.4

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track—until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the “lucky” associates. She’s offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back.

In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, in the heart of Appalachia, a part of the world she has only read about. Mattie Wyatt, lifelong Brady resident and head of the town’s legal aid clinic, is there to teach her how to “help real people with real problems.” For the first time in her career, Samantha prepares a lawsuit, sees the inside of an actual courtroom, gets scolded by a judge, and receives threats from locals who aren’t so thrilled to have a big-city lawyer in town. And she learns that Brady, like most small towns, harbors some big secrets.

Her new job takes Samantha into the murky and dangerous world of coal mining, where laws are often broken, rules are ignored, regulations are flouted, communities are divided, and the land itself is under attack from Big Coal. Violence is always just around the corner, and within weeks Samantha finds herself engulfed in litigation that turns deadly.

Genres

Mood

informative

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Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Hugo Damián Pastor

This book follows the steps of a New York lawyer that is forced to leave her work and the city she loves and start working pro-bono in a small town near the Apalaches. There, she discovers the truth about mining companies, how it affects the nature and the life of everyone around them.

The book itself has great momentum, something that Grisham knows how to deliver. Even when not much seems to be happening, the story flows quickly and never gets boring. However, after a coupl of good twists, the plot seems to come to halt and then just fades away in the last couple of chapters.

Good book, but a poor ending.

December 22, 2015

Sean

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.

July 16, 2019