Meanwhile the covert operators create their own man: Ron Fisk, a political newcomer. “They picked Fisk because he was just old enough to cross their low threshold of legal experience, but still young enough to have ambitions,” the book explains. Fisk is also new enough to be wowed by perks like private jets, which allow him to make so many more campaign stops than his rivals can, and by all the new attention lavished on him by his backers. He barely has time to wonder why they find him so appealing or where all those campaign funds are coming from.

“The Appeal” is clever enough to throw in a rogue third candidate, a clownishly unelectable figure who can draw publicity away from Sheila McCarthy. It also gives her liabilities like a sex life, provides her with an unhelpful zealot as a campaign adviser and underscores the terrible malleability of the voting public. According to a survey cited here, 69 percent of Mississippi’s electorate has no idea that the state’s Supreme Court justices run for office.

And this book has a keen ear for the baloney of biased rhetoric, particularly when it comes from the right. (Mr. Grisham makes no secret of his own political position. He has publicly supported the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.) “Are you aware that Justice Sheila McCarthy is considered the most liberal member of the Mississippi Supreme Court?” a poll inquires. And once the gratuitous issue of gay marriage has been intentionally shoehorned into the campaign, the voice-over on a television ad can be heard asking, “Will liberal judges destroy our families?”

While the election looms, Krane trots out the phrase “junk science” when it appeals the verdict and attacks the expert testimony of a toxicologist, geologist and pathologist, among others who affirmed the effects of Krane’s toxic pollutant. And Ron Fisk, who finds himself giving many of his stump speeches from pulpits, learns to fine-tune his emphases on religion and family values. The extent to which he rails against sin depends on how close he is to the lucrative casinos of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

“I must say that there is a lot of truth in this story,” Mr. Grisham points out in his author’s note. That point is already unmistakable in his book’s gallingly apt examples and its irrefutable tone. Only when he contrasts the difference between the cynical, venal, jaded rich and their noble, self-sacrificing victims does he court sloppiness and caricature. While the book notes that Wes Payton had to budget for each cup of coffee “and was always looking for quarters,” it presents Carl Trudeau, both stereotypically and ungrammatically, as “a hothead with a massive ego who hated to lose.”