THE RUNAWAY PLOT LINE

By John Skow

John Grisham's 1991 thriller, The Firm, offered an inside-the-ant-colony view of lawyers being loathsome, a redundant concept that made him rich and had readers roaring for more. His subsequent page turners wandered from this antijuridical obsession to a more casual sort of barrister bashing that occasionally had other things on its mind. In The Runaway Jury (Doubleday; 401 pages; $26.95), obsession is back.

Now let's see, who or what do we hate more than lawyers? That's right, jury duty. And big, fat, sleazy corporations with maggoty ad campaigns and overpaid ceos. And shameless, unjustifiable federal subsidies! And corporate legal departments, yes, oh yes, crawling with lawyers with compound eyes and side-mounted mandibles!

That pretty much narrows it down, in terms of Grisham's latest set of villains. The new novel's plot involves a high-stakes civil suit against Big Tobacco, brought by the forces of what might be called Big Health, in the name of a widow whose poor slob of a husband smoked himself to death. The tobacco cartel has won every such suit up to this one, but now the odds are beginning to tip. This is why the novel's companies have set up an eight-figure war chest with a private cia of thugs and slinkers to administer it.

Believe as much of the bribery, suborning and general chicanery that follow as you want to. The trial is soured by corruption on both sides; even jury selection involves widespread spying on long lists of potential jurors. That doesn't altogether strain credibility. But when the jury is chosen and the leanings of one member, a supermarket manager, are learned to be in doubt, Big Tobacco buys his store's entire chain and offers him a fat salary, along with some thoughts on product litigation.

Oh, sure, let's believe that too. Where Grisham really stumbles is in grafting an adventure tale's hero and heroine--both young and good looking, she slightly smarter than he--onto the stiff frame of a civil trial. The awkward premise is that this pair of secretive anti-tobacco activists manages to plant him on the jury. He then easily takes control, getting an exceedingly dim judge to banish balky jurors and drugging another uncooperative panelist himself. She, meanwhile, remains offstage (not an asset in the sort of novel in which at least a modest degree of bodice ripping is expected) but does manage to drive the tobacco lawyers to blithering distraction with a series of enigmatic phone calls. Thus the good guys are as crooked as the bad guys, though they don't cause lung cancer.

But for all this criminality, the story is claustrophobic and actionless, woefully deficient in gunfights and car chases. What the author proves here is that when reader and jury are sequestered for 400 pages, the likely result is mutiny.

--By John Skow