Gray Mountain by John Grisham

Set in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia, this book is a combination of murder mystery and Appalachian drama.  Samantha Kofer loses her high profile job in NYC where she is an attorney for a financial group.  She technically is only furloughed but even that early on you know the hills will draw her in and her return to NYC is likely to be just for visits from that time forward.  To his credit, Grisham leaves the frequency up to the reader to decide if Samantha will become a permanent resident of Brady or just a temporary transplant from the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.

With a lawyer mother in Main Justice, a powerhouse attorney father even though he has been disbarred, this Georgetown Law graduate really had nowhere to go but up. Then the recession hit and the bottom fell out of the money contracts.  Given the option of quitting, trying to find another job or taking the furlough and keeping her health insurance she chose the latter!  Smart woman as health insurance is golden. The only option that responded was the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic and she decided to take it.

Brady, a fictional town in a nonexistent county, is the type of place where a little can go a long way. People are poor.  They are more than not undereducated and wary of outsiders.  Unlike the first book we read about Appalachia, these are hard-working folks who have the odds against them probably from day one.  I wondered when I first started the book, if meth use was going to be its central focus but it was a side show compared to the real criminal element in the area—strip mining and coal companies more interested in the bottom dollar than the people who work the mines.
I grew up when strip mining was first a hot topic.  Laws were enacted mandating the reclamation of the land.  Grisham points out in the book that much of the land reclaimed was made into things like golf courses in a land where the majority of the residents don’t have the time or money to play golf.  I know several people who died in the mines. Classmates fathers, uncles and brothers.  When Mr. Ryzer talked about how the miners had lost their union twenty years ago, I thought of the mine disaster that from a couple of years ago.  I lost a college acquaintance who went into the mines because it paid better than teaching.  That mine was a nonunion mine and safety was not a top priority.

People died—good and bad people. Lives were threatened and destroyed.  All good items for a book but not good for the millions of people who live like he depicted every day.  I liked the way Samantha grew into the job.  She began taking risks. Yes she was a city girl with lots of street smarts but in a city where you may never see the same person twice those smarts will require adjusting when you enter a small town where your business is everyone’s business!  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and the big city lawyers with their slick, threatening approach to bullying the poor into going without benefits, livelihoods and decency truly pissed her off. I know he probably won’t write a follow-up to this but I have written my own next chapter!  I look forward to discussing it with you at our next meeting!