Funeral Wars

'I'm just a country boy,' says Willie Gary when he addresses a jury. 'If I just talk in plain, ordinary talk, you won't hold that against me, will you?' The son of migrant corn-pickers, Gary is one of America's most successful lawyers: diamond-encrusted Rolex, private Gulfstream jet. In Funeral Wars, Jonathan Harr follows Gary's most notorious case, a contract dispute between rival funeral parlours. This is the bizarre story of how Gary turns that dispute into a multi-million-dollar morality play. Above all, though, it is his story, that of a simple Southern boy whose life has taken on the contours of legend.