John Grisham has written a string best-sellers, many of which were turned into movies. It seems his best one, though, from 1989–96. And for my money, nothing will ever equal The Firm. Which is not to say his later books aren’t good. They are, they’re very good. But they don’t have the same magic.

Gray Mountain was published in 2014. This may have been true in the earlier books, I didn’t really notice, but the writing is a little clumsy sometimes. For instance, he’ll have a character giving exposition rather than tell it through the 3rd-person narrator. But it doesn’t work as well. People don’t talk like that, only omniscient narrators do. I’m pretty sure I know why he did it, I think he was trying to humanize the information more, but to me, it was just clumsy.

The interpersonal relationships were clumsy, too. Way too convenient. I’ll give him kudos for this, though: It was refreshing not to have the big city girl move to the tiny little town and fall in love with the one single guy there. That gets old real fast. But the characters weren’t all that well drawn. No one fascinated me. And do we all know as soon as the big city lawyer goes down to Appalachia that she’s going to get so swept up in the dramas there that she’ll turn down a $160,000 job to return to New York? A little too trite for my taste.

And the ending was very unsatisfying. Nothing was resolved. Of all the cases and lawsuit discussed, it would have been really nice to know how at least one of them ended.

I’m not sure he was worrying about any of that, though. I think it was all about the facts of the story. It’s about rural Appalachian people dying of black lung disease and other coal-related illnesses, and the big coal companies causing it and not caring. Even with medical records stating unequivocally an employee has advanced black lung, the companies would refuse to pay the benefits they were required to pay. So, the person had to keep working in the mines because it was the only way to support his family, and he got worse and worse during the decade-or-more-long battle, finally dying very prematurely. And still the coal companies refuse to pay benefits, saying they are not responsible.

This happens with other industries, too. The government refused to pay benefits to a friend of mine when lyme disease kept him from working because they said the disease was not work-related. The guy was a forest ranger! And there are other examples. But I think because the country is so dependent on coal – and because the coal companies have such deep pockets that they can bankrupt you before they’ve run out of appeals and delaying tactics – we don’t pay attention to it. Until I read this book, I had no idea. So, great literature or not, this is an important book and I would recommend it for that reason alone.

And there were moments in the book when the old Grisham wrote a magnificent word or two. When describing two sisters, he says, “Through the mysteries of adolescence, Hope, who was only ten month older, was at least a foot taller the Keely.” I love it! It had nothing to do with anything else in the book, it was just a bit of great writing for the sake of great writing.