4.5 stars. Erin Brockovich is an intriguing character study. In the early '90's, as a single mother with no skills of any sort, she basically talked her way into a job with attorney Ed Masry. And then one day as she was sorting through case files, she ran across boxes of files dealing with Pacific Gas & Electric and the small, high-desert town of Hinkley, California. Brockovich is tenacious when she senses something amiss, and with PG&E trying to buy all the resident's homes amid skyrocketing cancer cases, something was definitely wrong in Hinkley. Investigating further, she determined that PG&E was dumping toxic waste (hexavalent chromium) near its generating plant and it had leeched into the groundwater, causing a variety of cancers in and around the town. Her research under Masry's guidance brought about the largest settlement in a direct-action lawsuit in US history (And it's worth noting that Julia Roberts won a Best Actress Oscar in 2000 by playing this tough, fast-talking character). In this series, which begins with Rock Bottom, Brockovich is writing about environmental issues that concern her the most. This novel is a very fast, three-day examination of the practices of Big Coal, particularly Mountaintop Removal: "...a cheap way to extract coal by blasting off the tops of mountains, forests and all - what the miners called "overburden" - and dumping it into the valleys below while huge machines clawed at the exposed coal seams. Extracting coal this way was cheap, and it used half as many men as underground mining to get at coal twice as fast. But it was damned expensive in terms of the cost to the people and the environment - poisoned streams and groundwater, fish kills, flash floods, destroyed habitats, unemployment, housing values decimated, wells turned toxic." This is strong stuff for fiction, but it illustrates some of the many problems we have with corporate greed and malfeasance in this country.