This is one of those other kinds of John Grisham novels. In general, even among his legal thrillers, there’s two types of John Grisham novels. The tightly-plotted thriller like The Pelican Brief or The Runaway Jury is one type. In this type, the pacing is fast, it’s a puzzle being formed in front of you, and it often involves a silly amount of machination and design to bring home a twisty kind of ending. In the other, like A Time to Kill and here, The Rainmaker, we have a character study within the legal world where the plot is compelling, but not a thriller.
In this novel, we meet Rudy Bailey (a pun?) in his last months of law school. He’s got a job lined up with a respectable firm, he’s in his last classes, none of which are very taxing, and he’s currently at a free legal clinic working hours for his class on law impacting older people. He’s got two clients in this opening scene. One is an older woman who wants to change her will to move her supposed millions away from her children who don’t call her to an evangelical minister who does. Second, he meets an older couple whose son is dying from leukemia after their sketchy insurance has refused to pay for a bone marrow transplant. He thinks both cases are too complex for legal aid and his plan is to recommend they both seek further council from a more experienced lawyer in that field.
He takes both cases to law professors he’s worked with and it seems like the insurance case could be a legitimate big case. About this same time, his job dries up because of a merger, and he has to scramble for a new job late in the game. He begins to tinker with taking on the big insurance case, but there’s a lot to do in the meantime to prepare.
Like I said, this is more of a character study, so there’s a lot of plot that happens to get us to the trial, but the trial itself is fast-paced.
The book is not great or anything and there’s some very very very left-field moments that happen late in the game.
