Krane appeals the initial court decision, and Trudeau decides to secretly invest several million dollars in litigation 'insurance': He pays a mysterious consultant named Barry Rinehart to make sure Krane wins its legal appeal. Krane's Manhattan-based CEO, Carl Trudeau, remains defiant: 'I swear to you on my mother's grave that not one dime of Krane's money will ever be touched by those ignorant people,' he tells his defeated legal team. As a result, Bowmore's drinking water has become contaminated, and 'the rate of cancer was fifteen times the national average,' in a plotline that echoes Jonathan Harr's Woburn-based 'A Civil Action.' A widow sues Krane in state court and, with the help of a husband-and-wife attorney team, wins a damage award of $41 million. has been illegally dumping chemical waste for years. The setting is Bowmore, Miss., where Krane Chemical Co. His panoramic story is a legal thriller, but its mammoth ambition and unflinching moral outlook enable 'The Appeal' to transcend the genre. Like Wolfe, Grisham unfolds his tale of a lawsuit against a chemical company from the perspectives of all involved, from the bereft widow whose husband has died of cancer to the billionaire CEO ruthlessly trying to keep his company in business. With 'The Appeal,' a novel that could become its own era-defining classic, John Grisham holds up that same mirror to our age. It mercilessly skewered Reagan-era American values, holding up a mirror that made readers simultaneously nod in self-recognition and flinch in horror.

Tom Wolfe's epic 1987 novel, 'The Bonfire of the Vanities,' unforgettably examined the money grubbing, hypocrisy, and spiritual hollowness of New York City during the 1980s.

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