[close] Jonathan Harr's Funeral Wars delivers a spry rendering of O'Keeffe versus the Loewen Group, a Mississippi court case that cast the American death industry and a prominent personal injury lawyer as its leading characters. Willie Gary came from a poor Southern family, but by endeavour and enterprise transcended racial barriers to progress from High School in Indiantown, where he was known as "little boss man", to Law School and then the High Court. "Lawye r Gary", used to addressing church congregations, achieved his first $1m jury verdict in 1984; prone to asking juries to pardon the "plain, ordinary talk" of a country boy, he was soon travelling between cases in his own executive jet.

In 1995, he became involved with a claim by local funeral director Jerry O'Keeffe that he had been duped by Ray Loewen, who owned a chain of funeral homes across Canada and had started to penetrate the US market. According to Gary, the case was a morality tale, about "lying, cheating and stealing"; to Harr, it concerned changing times and attitudes, and an utterly compelling collision of characters. Gary is aided by lawyer Michael Allred, with a Klan background, who admits t o him his prejudices, but declares "I'm trying to work on it--like when an alcoholic goes to Alcoholics Anonymous". Between them, they assembled an almost seamless continuity of facts that only lacked the singular matter of contract violation, the legal basis for the case. Gary's unashamed manipulation of the jury won a staggering 260m award for his client, only just failing to secure $1bn in punitive damages, though O'Keeffe elected to accept a lesser sum that still ultimately crippled the Loewen Group. Jonathan Harr, for his part, presents the evidence with admirable poise, building a disciplined, understated narrative in skilful contrast to Gary's grandiloquence. The core subject has been covered before (see Jessica Mitford 's The American Way of Death, or Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking and Bodies in Motion and at Rest), but Funeral Wars deftly demonstrates the rigours of life after death, American Dream fulfilment and the fruitful rewards a lick of oratory gloss can return. --David Vincent [close]