19. The Appeal, by John Grisham
In the town of Bowmore, Mississippi, a chemical manufacturing plant has dumped its waste products into the water supply, producing a deadly cancer cluster. A lawsuit against the company wins, but the appeal has to be taken to the Mississippi Supreme Court, on which judges are elected, rather than appointed.
Most of the book is about the whole election process, and it doesn't shy away from the ugly mess -- massive amounts of money spent and half-truths used to turn the voters against a sitting judge. Indeed, the novel went a long way toward explaining why it is that voters get so many e-mails begging for money for races they can't vote in (which I'd been wondering about, given the number of e-mails I've gotten asking for money for out-of-state congressional races).
Overall, I found this to be a decent read, although quite a number of reviewers have said it compared poorly with Grisham's earlier novels. (Since this is the first one I've read, I really can't say whether I would have liked the earlier ones better.)
