Although the Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich is never mentioned, John Grisham’s 20th novel is clearly conceived as a kind of sour sequel to it. In the fact-based film, a likable male-female duo achieves a surprise win in a David v Goliath legal fight with a corporation, proving that contaminated water was the cause of a cluster of devastating illnesses.

And that, essentially, is the starting-point here, with the difference that the courtroom victory is won by Wes and Mary Grace Payton, a cash-strapped husband-and-wife team. With the widow of a cancer victim as plaintiff, they demonstrate beyond doubt that a series of deaths in Bowmore, Mississippi was the result of the dumping of toxic waste in the local water supply by a factory owned by Krane Chemical. The jury’s stunning verdict requires Krane to pay $41m in damages. But this is only the novel’s first chapter, no money can be handed over until the firm’s appeal is heard by the state’s Supreme Court, and Krane’s boss, Carl Trudeau, tells his legal aides: “I swear to you on my mother’s grave that not one dime of Krane money will ever be touched by those ignorant people.”

Trudeau’s plan is not to hire better lawyers with stronger arguments – nobody seriously questions Krane’s culpability. It is to unseat a Supreme Court judge so as to swing what is expected to be 5-4 decision. A secretive specialist firm run by Barry Rinehart is hired to target Justice Sheila McCarthy, a divorcee with a middle-of-the-road voting record, who belongs to neither right nor left factions at the court. Lunch in Washing-ton with a venal veteran senator helps persuade Ron Fisk, a clean-cut, churchgoing attorney with no judging experience, to stand against her.

Rinehart’s organisation runs an $8m campaign covertly funded by Trudeau centring on aggressive televi-sion ads that absurdly caricature McCarthy as a “raging liberal”, soft on criminals, pro gay marriage and anti business (it also sponsors a zany, boozy third candidate purely for his nuisance value). The election’s outcome is never in doubt, and this is not an isolated case: one character says “the pro-business lobby has slowly, methodically marched across this country and purchased one Supreme Court seat after another”. (Grisham’s afterword interestingly criticises the fact that “private money is allowed in judicial elections”, but does not criticise judicial elections per se.)

As the campaign unfolds, the novel regularly counterpoints the Paytons and Trudeau: the struggling lawyers still unable to reduce their debts, pay their staff or offer hope to the other local Krane victims who they meet at church; the Wall Street titan already tiring of size-zero Brianna, his latest trophy wife, but relishing a financial scam that enables him actually to profit from his firm’s tumbling share price.

Recalling Dickens and other 19th-century fiction, these contrasts between cuddly goodies and cartoon villain are schematic and manipulative. But the author’s contempt for the soulless super-rich, previously evident in The King of Torts, does produce some telling satirical moments, such as the Tom Wolfe-like set-piece scene of a black-tie dinner and art auction in aid of a Manhattan museum where Brianna sits on the board. Trudeau loathes the modern painting that is being auctioned and has never heard of the artist, but nev-erthless pays $18m for it – partly to keep her happy, partly to win a willy-waving contest with a business rival.

As in this example, the most successful sections of The Appeal tend to resemble well-researched journalism. What makes these passages riveting is the level of detail Grisham incorporates into his depictions of his tycoon’s lifestyle, the senator’s career or how Fisk’s campaign is conducted. But the anger that informs these sections seems to rule out suspense, twists, character development and other novelistic frivolities.

It is not that Grisham has forgotten how to tell a story, rather that he has chosen to tell one where the depressing inevitability of the outcome (up to Fisk’s election, at least) is part of the point – outside the movies, he suggests, big business can normally reverse any defeat. The Appeal is a Goliath-beats-David tale, and, as such, is an unusually dull read; the first time Grisham has produced a legal thriller without any thrills.

The Appeal by John Grisham
Century £18.99 pp355

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy