Bending the Arc (Book 1 in LawForce series) by Nicholas Gretener, eBook, 399 pages
Synopsis from GoodReads: Jonathan Hendrix, the youngest U.S. Attorney General in history, knows that bending the arc won’t happen on its own, help is needed. He is determined to curb runaway civil jury awards that are threatening to destabilize the economy. Graduating law school, Steve Shane is a top wall street prospect. Shunning the big firms, he sets up his own practice and six years later has developed a solid reputation as a commercial litigator.
Hendrix recruits Shane to create LawForce, a government-supported, legal SWAT team to be deployed in key cases where an inequality of counsel threatens bad verdicts. Their first case – Green Action Coalition v. Wildcat Oil & Gas. A medium sized oil and gas company, Wildcat is plagued by an apparently random series of environmental accidents. Not accidents according to the Green Action Coalition, a leader in the new era of aggressive environmental litigation, but evidence of a pattern of negligence. The damages sought by the GAC have the potential to destroy Wildcat. Acting for the GAC is a high-powered team of legal eagles from the blue-chip firm of Todd Ives Tillington, led by senior partner Andrew Tillington III. Wildcat appears hopelessly outclassed . . . then Shane is retained. Shane and LawForce discover they are in for more than just a tough legal battle as they negotiate the twists and turns of the case to its explosive courtroom finale.
BOOK REVIEW: For those of you who don't know, I was in the Coast Guard and station in New Orleans. I was stationed there for 5 years with a brief 6 months in Elizabeth City, NC for school and 6 months in Houston, TX after Hurricane Katrina. We had many Search and Rescue calls out to oil rigs so reading this book really felt like I was reading about my home. Even thought I'm from the PNW originally, nowhere ever felt more like home than New Orleans. Anyway, getting to read about places that I have been (Houston, The Galleria, Texarkana for example) makes me feel an immediate connection.
There were a couple of terms used in a context that I had never heard of before but after looking up, they make sense. First, the lawyers refer to the lawsuits as "actions" which threw me for the biggest loop! I thought maybe in some of the text it meant the motions for the case until I looked it up and it means the active lawsuit itself. Then they referred to their cases as "files". This one didn't take me nearly as long to figure out because I'm used to hearing to tv and movies about case files so there's that.
Ultimately this was a 4.5 star read for me. The term actions really stuck with me not fully understanding what it meant because I'm not a lawyer and I've never heard it used in tv and movies (at least I don't think so). Then there is the fact that one of the characters has the same name as a girl that pretended to be my friend through most of high school only to end up being the biggest...I'm not going to get into it. I was able to keep my feelings regarding that name separate for the most part until her full name was used a couple of times. That's totally a me thing and not on the author. He did an amazing job giving all of his characters amazing personalities and traits although sometimes I started to wonder if too many full name characters were being added but, as you know, I tend to do most of my reading at night before bed and that's also just a me thing! On that note, I also stayed up way too late to finish reading it. My heart was racing, my mind was trying to connect dots, some where right and some blew my mind, and ultimately I'm so glad I didn't wait until the morning to finish it! I highly recommend this book if you enjoy the legal/court room kind of reads with some suspense! I can't wait to see what LawForce does next. This book just released on 1.1 and at the time of this post is currently available in the Kindle Unlimited library.
4.5/5 Stars
2025 Reading Challenge: 1/50 complete
Comments