The author here, as is a usual theme in his various works, takes on various criminal and bordering criminal practices that need to be checked, investigated, curbed, expunged, and more - this time in coal industry, specifically in neighbourhood of the capital, albeit it affects the lives of the cities close by so little it is quite another world.
Where the cities of New York and Washington D.C. are busy with life of finance and government, the sparsely inhabited regions around coal mines are of poor who lived there for generations, worked in the mines for generations and are now not only not required due to changed practices of mines but have their lives and health endangered.
The practices of mines used once to be of tunnelling under the land to get the coal or whatever was being mined, which used a great deal of manpower and got very expensive and bothersome when technology offered machines that could be used instead. Except the machines won't work as substitutes exactly, or rather it would be just as bothersome if that was all the substitution.
Strip mining literally strips the earth - of trees, vegetation, and whole mountains, reducing the land to devastation in less than a generation. What's more, the remnants of the mining are let go into the land or stored in less than optimal way so they seep in, or even worse, dumped where they can be into water, so in all the land and water are polluted and people die of horrible diseases. If they cannot move, they must resort to using bottled water for almost all use of water, which would be expensive enough for rich of NY and LA. For those poor in that area, it is yet another life threatening burden.
Grisham here combines two of his separate streams of style, by writing a book detailing all this criminal practices, including the thugs employed by the companies threatening, and finally resort to murdering those that fight their dirty practices legally and sometimes worse, win the legal battles. But it is written at a slower pace, albeit one reads it with all the thrills of chase and horror and concern and more, knowledge of a topic one is not closely familiar with. Then he goes on sticking to reality, and instead of the fairy tale solution of the good people winning he usually provides after a crime chase, he gives the real life of those good people not yet murdered going on living and going on to continue fighting the battles legally.
One might suspect he has a sequel with satisfactory solutions in the offing, if he ever wrote sequels. There is of course a first time for everything.
