Sigh. I wanted to give this one more stars. What I love about Grisham is you never feel bad for having met his characters and experienced his stories. The majority of his books are set in the field of law and justice, but they are far from cold, impersonal, or methodical. The procedural aspects of his stories are window-dressing, very interesting and education, but merely a backdrop to experience heart-felt characters in stories and situations we care about and identify with, and The Rainmaker is no exception. It's truly a David and Goliath story, the young, inexperienced lawyer Rudy, fresh from the bar exam, taking on a gigantic insurance company who treacherously denied coverage for an operation that could have saved a man's life. They offer to settle for the cost of the operation, but he's going for the throat.

SPOILER WARNING!

He wins, and for much, much more than he was asking, but by the time you get to that point, it's almost a foregone conclusion, and that's where Grisham errs here. The judge favors Rudy to the point where you would think he is actually in cahoots with him, and it seems as if Rudy experiences virtually no opposition as he pursues his case. He has the world at his fingertips and gets far too many breaks. One could argue that the novel's suspense actually takes place in all the drama leading up to the case--Rudy's final year of law school, his scrimping and scrapping just to make it to and through the bar exam, his heavy discouragement pursuing employment and the guy he finally works for, his run-ins with the law, etc., but I think Grisham missed a huge opportunity here. I seems to remember Coppola milking the potential for great intrigue and drama in the courtroom for the film, which Diana and I might watch tonight. I'm looking forward to that. Also, there's the problem of the ending. I won't go into it, but Grisham has a tendency to snap his fingers and make it all go away, say "to hell with it", so to speak, when his characters are up against impossible or at the very least extremely difficult odds. I think he could have pursued the subplot with Kelly and the cops and perhaps another trial for another 100 pages, which would have made for extremely riveting reading. As it is, The Rainmaker is a beach book at best, a great one, very entertaining, but it won't make your top ten the way that it could have, and that's too bad.