John Grisham has written close to 40 novels, and until three days ago I had not read any of them. But I had found a signed, perfect condition, first edition of The Appeal for $4, so I picked it up and thought I would give it a try. I don’t think this is one of his better known or best reviewed novels (Goodreads 3.64), but I found it readable, quick, and interesting. I also found it very relevant to the political condition of the United States today, and to today’s presidential election.

The plot is pretty simple. The location is a small town in Mississippi, and a jury awards $41,000,000 (actual damages and punitive) to a woman who claimed that the death of her husband and son from cancer were caused by discharges from a now-closed factory owned by a mega-company headquartered in New York The offending company appeals the case. Hence, the title.

The plaintiff is an impoverished woman, living in a mobile home park, in a town with cancer rates 30% higher than the national average. Her lawyers are a husband-wife team, who have spent every penny they own (and much more) financing this case, and will face financial and professional ruin if they cannot collect.

The appeal of the verdict is going to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which has a record of favoring industry in this type of case, but of favoring industry by a dangerously close margin. For this reason, the CEO (and majority owner) of the company in New York is advised to hire an expensive organization in Miami which tends to operate under the radar to help assure that they will win the appeal. And he does.

Mississippi is one of those states where Supreme Court justices are elected, and two of the least reliably conservative justices are up for reelection. The goal of the Miami firm is to sow questions about one of the justices (the only woman on the Court), and to find someone to run for this important judicial position who will vote the way they would want him to vote. They find a personable young attorney, a partner is a firm somewhere in the south of the state, who becomes excited to run for the Supreme Court, something that his career to date has in no way prepared him for. The campaign, as it turns out, could have been the campaign that the Donald Trump’s runs have modeled themselves after. It was based on a blitz of advertising and the placement of news stories based on lies, half truths and more lies. The candidate himself is not Donald Trump. He is not as evil as he is naive, unaware that his campaign is based on a foundation of lies, and equally unaware that his campaign is being supported and funded by the head of a corporation that is facing a $41,000,000 debt. And, in fact, the $41,000,000 is an understatement, as hundreds of other individual plaintiffs are coming out of the woodwork, and at least two class action suits are in the planning stages.

It is, to be sure, a clever campaign. His organizers are attempting to redefine the current justice, who is often dissenting from the opinions of a very right wing court, and turn her from a moderate into a perceived outright dangerous left wing out of control liberal, clearly out to destroy Mississippi. They look up old cases where she has written dissents, misstate the facts of the cases, avoid all nuances when discussing her written opinions, and promote the misstatements as obvious truths in their media and print advertising. They create two opposing candidates, not just one. The first is the lawyer discussed above, whom they present as a real son of the Great State of Mississippi, and who is able to speak well and put on a credible campaign. The other is a lawyer, who spends his time in casinos, not in courtrooms, and is generally drunk. He is there to cause chaos and make the voters aware of the overall contest for the seat on the bench (they pay him $100,000 to become a candidate, and then $50,000 to withdraw from the race when he has served his purpose).

They attempt to keep other attorneys from filing other cases for other dead and dying plaintiffs by holding global settlement conferences, attended by teams of lawyers, which hold promise to the would-be litigators of settlements without having to file cases, but are designed to go on forever and stall for time, and nothing else.

There are other goings on that I am not going to discuss here, except to say that they are elements which do pull the overall plot together. And, this post is not going to be a total spoiler. I am not going to tell you who won the race for the Supreme Court, or tell you what the Supreme Court decided on appeal. For these you have to read the book. I did it in three sittings of about two hours each. It is an easy read.

But, back to my title. On this day in the real 2024, when one of the real candidates for the real presidency of the United States runs on a campaign that sounds like the campaign run in make-believe (sort of) Mississippi in make-believe 2008, this fictional story is much too real. Perhaps today, even to John Grisham, it seems more real than when it was published more than 15 years ago, in the halcyon early days of Barack Obama.`

And again, I don’t want this to be a 2024 spoiler, either. I am not going to tell you who is going to be the next president of the United States. I am not even going to tell you for whom I voted. All I will say is this: may the best woman win.