I’m usually a lukewarm John Grisham fan.  I was a youngish paralegal when he hit it big with The Firm, but I found too many holes in the next few legal thrillers to enjoy them much.  I’m too much of a southern girl not to love A Time to Kill and I like some of his non-legal stories.   I love what he did for the Oxford American.  All in all, you could say there are writers I usually like more but that’s not true today. Today, I found out about Gray Mountain and this evening, I read the book.   I had to because this Grisham thriller touches a field close to home.   This is his book about coal.

For those who don’t know, coal generates a lot of the USA’s electricity.  Right now, it supplies about thirty-nine percent, more than any other single source, and that’s way down from what it used to be.  Coal mining is a big, tough industry and it has a huge impact where I live.  People have jobs and incomes  here that they probably wouldn’t have except for coal.  On the other hand, the toll mining takes on a human body is scary.  Even with safety precautions, mining is a dangerous, physically demanding job and the people who do this work for years sometimes get injured badly.   It’s not unusual for a miner, still in his prime, to have undergone multiple surgical procedures for torn shoulder injuries, messed up knees or bulging discs in his neck or back.  Some miners also end up with a lung disease that comes from exposure to coal mine dust. The dust settles into their lungs and creates scars that impair their breathing.  The disease, known as Black Lung, often doesn’t appear until after the miner has retired and there’s no cure or effective treatment for it, short of a lung transplant.  I know this because I work with folks that help eligible miners receive benefits.

Grisham writes about the coal dust in Grey Mountain and what it does to the miners and their families.  He also writes about the environmental problems caused by mining and some high-risk litigation adventures but his best passages, as always, are about working for “real people”.  These are the people at the center of every lawsuit, some good, some bad, but usually all overwhelmed souls.   They don’t trust anyone completely, including their own counsel, but they need help so they feel their way along, hoping it will come out all right, a thing they and their attorney know doesn’t always happen.  In turn, their attorneys try to do the best they can for the clients, spent more time worrying than they like to admit and work for less money than most of them expected back in law school.   It’s the life of a plaintiff’s attorney and that’s what Grisham knows best.
 
There’s the usual plot of the youthful, in-over-the-head lawyer who gets to see some unexpected sides of the law and if the critics complain about that part of Grisham’s formula,  well, it still sells books.   But if you read Gray Mountain, keep an eye on the background, on the small-town folks who (as George Bailey said) do most of the living and dying in the Appalachian Mountains.  They’re the real heroes of this book and they sell their lives to mine coal.