Samantha Kofer (and John Grisham) Come to Coal Country: Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain - John Grisham

Think back to 2008… Lehman's just gone under, the Dow is falling like a rock, and those industries that control the flow of money are panicked. Samantha Kofer works for such an industry – the real estate department of the world’s largest law firm. Rather, she did work there – she’s just been “furloughed.” Informed that the firm would hold her position and pay her insurance for a year if she’d intern at a suitable charity (at no pay, of course), Samantha finds herself ripped from a cushy job in Manhattan and dropped in a legal aid clinic deep in western Virginia’s coal country. Talk about your culture shock…

Take one high-powered lawyer who hasn’t seen the inside of a courtroom since passing the bar and put her in a practice one step above small claims court, and she’s either going to go insane or fall in love with her job. In Samantha’s case, it’s apparently the latter: although only slowly, she comes to the realization that the reason she practices law is not to shuffle paper for millionaires, but to make a difference for little people. Out there in coal country, there sure seem to be a lot of little people.

Samantha finds herself under the wing of another lawyer, one who fights tooth and nail against the coal companies that run the region. But the companies fight back, and it's not always just in the courts: Samantha is going to learn that the hard way.

Mountaintop coal mine (source: GreenLaw)

Virgil Flowers Goes Back to School for Deadline (John Sandford)

Deadline (A Virgil Flowers Novel) - John Sandford

Virgil Flowers got the call, just as one might expect, in the wee hours of the morning. Never mind that to reach his phone he had to crawl over the warm, willing female flesh lying in bed next to him, there was  something more important afoot: a dognapper had snatched a pair of Labrador retrievers. Hey, I can relate – that’s damned important! Bright and early the next morning, Virgil found himself addressing a group of angry dog owners in the little Mississippi River town of Trippton. The locals were pretty sure who’d been snatching local dogs, but they needed help getting them back. Virgil reluctantly agreed to help – guess he’s not a dog person…

While investigating the missing pooches, Virgil and his local contact Johnson Johnson (brother of Mercury Johnson, though not of Evinrude Johnson) stumble over a meth-cooking operation. Great: now Virgil has an excuse to be in town! But wait, even while he waits for the DEA to raid the meth lab, a couple of kids stumble over the body of a local newspaper reporter. Something doesn’t add up, though – Virgil’s getting two entirely different stories about what was going on in Clancy Conley’s life, and that discrepancy is tickling his spidey sense. 

If something is rotten in Buchanan County that Fuckin’ Flowers just stepped in it – and with all the dogs in town snatched in the middle of the night, that’s definitely not what he stepped in…

And Here You Thought Rupert Murdoch Was a Nice Guy at Heart: Hack Attack (Nick Davies)

Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch - Nick Davies

About half a decade ago a reporter for one of the leading British Newspapers, The Guardian, thought he detected a discrepancy in the coverage of a minor crime. A London PI and a journalist for a London tabloid had been convicted for hacking the voicemails of the Royal family. Most Brits nodded sagely and then went on about the business of devouring football results and slobbering over page 3 girls (not unlike we Yanks after all, are they?) Not Nick Davies, though: Davies, the aforementioned Guardian reporter, smelled a rat. Thus began the five-year odyssey in which a handful of journalists and legal eagles took on the empire of one of the world’s most powerful men and fought it to a standstill.

For a few days.

Rupert Murdoch [source: David
Shankbone/wikimedia commons]

Davies lays out the history, often in excruciating detail, in his 2014 memoir Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch. Davies and his editor, Alan Rusbridger, began the laborious process of uncovering the seamy underbelly of Murdoch’s print empire in Britain with a single story in 2009. By the end, they had stripped the covers off not just the invasion of the privacy of just about anyone with any celebrity but also bribery of law enforcement. All this criminality was based on a single desire: for Murdoch’s journalism empire to become so powerful that they could dictate policy to the British government. They damned near succeeded.

Through 400-plus pages, Davies logs the small details of the crimes at News of the World, Murdoch’s flagship tabloid, and the involvement of officials of the company from James Murdoch to Rebekah Brooks. Over a period of three years, Davies and The Guardian worried at every piece of evidence, each inconsistency, every slip of the tongue by a participant. Names are named, including officials of the London Metropolitan Police and at Scotland Yard; likewise a series of residents of 10 Downing Street.

Reacher Reaches Nineteen, a Personal Milestone but Still Mediocre

Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel - Lee Childs

Considering the fact that I read dozens of novels every year, lots of them of the “no socially-redeeming qualities” variety, you might think that I had already devoured all eighteen of the Jack Reacher novels penned by Lee Childs. You’d be wrong: before Personal, the nineteenth in the series, my only exposure to Childs’ protagonist had been the Tom Cruise movie from 2012 which I’ve (accidentally) seen twice. Be that as it may, people have always sad that the novels in the series aren’t so interrelated that you have to read them in order, so I bit on Personal. I gotta say, the immense popularity of the series is a little puzzling to me…

Jack Reacher is, as usual, riding a bus somewhere when he spots the advertisement asking him to phone an old buddy. He makes the call, and within hours is whisked to a supersecret CIA billet on the opposite coast headed by an old acquaintance. There he learns that someone has hired a freelance sniper to put a bullet in the brain of one (or more) of the G-8 attendees, and the meeting in London is mere days away. Reacher’s needed because, at least in theory, he knows the mind of one of the four probably sniper candidates, having put him in jail fifteen years ago. John Kott is now free, and in the wind.

Reacher and his CIA minder, a tasty morsel named Casey Nice, head to Paris and then London in search of Kott. People die, Reacher does whatever it is that Reacher always does, and the evil plot underneath it all is exposed.

Par for the course for Reacher, I’m told.