The Runaway Jury

The Runaway Jury is a legal thriller by the American writer John Grisham, published in 1996. It was his seventh novel and was filmed in 2003.

The case at the centre of the book is brought by Celeste Wood, whose husband died of lung cancer, against a tobacco company, and the tort lawyers acting for her have chosen the venue with care. What they have not allowed for is the consultant working for the defence, a man who has spent his career making sure that juries reach the verdicts his clients want and who treats the selection of a jury as an engineering problem.

The complication is that one of the jurors, a man calling himself Nicholas Easter, got himself onto the panel deliberately, working with a woman known only as Marlee who is prepared to sell the outcome of the trial to whichever side pays. The novel follows the voir dire, the surveillance of the jurors, the pressure applied to them and the negotiation over the verdict, and it is as much about the machinery of a trial as about the question of whether the company is liable.