Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...century, this tale of a young man, a real-estate dreamer, embodies both the realities and the fantasies of a growing nation infatuated with its own possibilities. Dressler is only nine years old when he builds a display that makes the 5' cigars in his father's tobacco shop look more expensive. As a teenage bellhop, he boosts sales at a hotel concession. In 1894 at the age of 22, he opens the Metropolitan Lunchroom and Billiard Parlor, a winning concept that is expanded northward into the newly developing acreage bordering Central Park...
...agent based in San Francisco, convinced a group of Chinese arms dealers that he was a Mafia big shot who was in the market to buy guns for drug rings and street gangs. By the time the undercover deal was over, Hipple and his partner, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who also posed as a mobster, had persuaded the brokers to smuggle 2,000 fully automatic Chinese-government-made AK-47s into...
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...
...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...
...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...