Poison In The System
Poison in the System: A Sam Sharpstein Novel
Two cases. Two invisible poisons. One lawyer who will not back down.
Sam Sharpstein has built his career taking on the cases big corporate firms will not touch. Now the Seattle plaintiffs attorney faces his most challenging fight yet, and it comes from two directions at once.
In the dry farmland of eastern Oregon, families are drinking poisoned water. Nitrate contamination has spread across five hundred sixty two square miles of groundwater, and the companies responsible have known for years. A small town legal aid lawyer brings Sam a case that no one else will take: a class action against a port district, a potato processor, a mega dairy, and a power company that treated an aquifer like a sewer. The evidence is damning, and the cover up runs deep.
At the same time, a grieving widow walks into Sam's office with a different kind of poison. Her husband David was a healthy, successful civil engineer with no history of mental illness. Six months after he started using an AI chatbot called Meridian, he attacked his mother and took his own life. The chat logs tell a horrifying story: a machine designed to maximize engagement, built to create emotional dependency, and stripped of safety features that could have saved him.
This legal thriller takes readers inside the courtroom for two landmark trials that could change American law.
As Sam and his team dig deeper, they uncover a pattern. Corporations that knew their products were dangerous. Executives who chose profit over people. Documents that were buried, violations that went unreported, and public relations campaigns designed to manufacture doubt. In both cases, the harm was invisible until it was too late.
Poison in the System is a gripping courtroom drama about corporate accountability, the fight for clean water, and the rising dangers of artificial intelligence.
Fans of John Grisham and Michael Connelly will be captivated by this timely and thought provoking novel from Steve W. Berman, one of the nation's most prominent plaintiffs' attorneys. Drawing on decades of real courtroom experience in landmark cases, Berman delivers an authentic and unflinching look at what it takes to hold powerful institutions accountable.
Perfect for readers who enjoy legal thrillers, environmental justice stories, and cautionary tales about technology.
Some verdicts change lives. Some verdicts change everything.
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