Gray Mountain

There is a new heroine for John Grisham, and she is full of surprises.

When the crisis strikes in 2008, Samantha Kofer's career at a big Wall Street legal company is booming. She gets laid off, furloughed, and is hauled out of the building.However, Samantha is one of the "lucky" coworkers. She is given the option to work unpaid for a year at a legal aid clinic, after which there is very little chance she would be hired back for her previous position.

Samantha relocates from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia, a town of 2,200 people in the center of Appalachia, a region she has only ever read about, in a matter of days. Her mentor is Mattie Wyatt, a Brady native who oversees the town's legal aid clinic. He will teach her the art of "helping real people with real problems." For the first time in her professional life, Samantha drafts a lawsuit, visits a real courtroom, gets reprimanded by the judge, and faces threats from neighbors who aren't exactly overjoyed to have a big-city attorney in the area. Brady, like most tiny towns, she discovers, is hiding some very significant secrets.

Samantha's new career thrusts her into the dark and perilous world of coal mining, where rules, laws, and regulations are routinely disregarded, communities are split apart, and Big Coal is attacking the soil itself. Because violence is never far away, Samantha finds herself embroiled in a potentially fatal lawsuit in a matter of weeks.