The King of Torts

The King of Torts is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 2003 by Doubleday. It went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list on publication, and a paperback edition followed the same year.

Clay Carter is a public defender in Washington, D.C., and he has been there long enough to know that the work is not the training ground for a career that brighter colleagues pretend it is. Then he is handed the case of Tequila Watson, a man charged with a killing he cannot explain. Watson insists that he was not in control of his body when he fired, a claim Carter dismisses at first and then cannot put out of his mind. Working for a client with no money, he goes into parts of the city he would rather avoid, forces drug rehabilitation centres to produce medical records, and finds that another man accused of a similar murder has a similar record. Around this time he is also dating Rebecca Van Horn, a congressional aide, whose father is a real estate developer Carter cannot stand.

The book follows what happens when a lawyer with a hopeless client works out that the injuries of ordinary people can be packaged and sold, and it is as much about the business of litigation as about the case that starts it.