Yes, we know strip mining is bad. Where did John Grisham go?

I keep waiting for the real Grisham—the author of “The Firm” and “A Time to Kill”—to return, but alas, it looks like I’ll have to keep waiting. Grey Mountain has a somewhat promising beginning, and although main protagonist Samantha is a bore from beginning to end, the plot has potential even if the most interesting character in the book gets killed off much too soon. And while I have total sympathy with Grisham’s theme in this book, the constant preaching and repetition put my teeth on edge. So disappointing!

Samantha is a very smart but rather spoiled rich girl—the daughter of two high-powered and long-divorced lawyers– who works long hours as a third-year associate in a boring corporate law firm. Her life—making partner, marrying well, 2.5 kids, etc.—is all planned out when Wall Street hits a big bump, the stock market takes a dive, and NY law firms start laying off employees. The hard-working Samantha is given a one-year furlough and offered a deal by her firm—keep your health insurance and work free for a non-profit for a year, and if all goes well, she’ll be allowed back into the fold. She ends up reluctantly taking an internship at a free law clinic in Appalachia and suddenly discovers that in the real world, a lot of people are poor, many are unemployed, some are drug addicted and abused, and just as she knows nothing of how they survive, they know nothing of the golden life she was born into. The big baddie in the mix is, of course, the coal companies who destroy land and water resources, wildlife and, most importantly, the lives of those who come under their heel.

Fellow lawyer Donovan is a born and bred Appalachian who is willing, by any and all means, to make the coal companies pay for the damage they did to his family when he was a boy, and to the damage they continue to do today, not only unimpeded by the government but often aided and abetted by the powers we elect to office. Samantha is supposedly torn between returning as quickly as possible to her old life or joining forces with Donovan in his battle against evil, but her ethics are as weak as the plot which begins its steady decline. One of the book’s mysteries—where are the stolen papers hidden that prove the insidious crimes of the biggest and baddest coal company of them all—proves sort of irrelevant to the story, as it turns out, while the mystery of who killed one of the characters is never actually resolved, and never really a mystery. Samantha’s dithering over what to do is irritating, silly, uninspired, and when she finally makes her choice, do any of us really care by that point?

Yes, I learned some useful stuff about strip-mining and why it needs to be stopped and those behind it punished. And yes, giving his fiction a moral center is absolutely laudatory and is what makes some of Grisham’s earlier books so powerful and so effective. Grey Mountain, for all its moral outrage, just doesn’t work. This author needs to take a few years off from the publishing pressures and figure out where he went off the path and how to get back on it.