Fat Chance

Fat Chance chronicles the plunder of clients by lawyers in the fen-phen diet drug scandal, focusing on a quartet of avaricious attorneys. The tale and its cavalcade of crazy, double-dealing characters is the stuff of John Grisham. It should, however, be on reading lists for law students, taught in tort classes, and used in legal ethics seminars (if there are any left).

~Alicia Mundy, author of Crystal Mesh: How Addiction to Money Turned Medical Device Makers, the FDA, and Doctors into Street Dealers

Fat Chance is the story of the fen-phen litigation and the prominent lawyers who, blinded by greed and hubris, lied to their clients and the judge, cheated their partners, and tried to keep their clients' money. Rick Christman's book is a well-written and remarkably complete account of fen-phen: the development and marketing of the drugs, the litigation that resulted from side effects, and the generous settlement that led lawyers to unethical and illegal behavior.

~W. H. Fortune, professor of law at the University of Kentucky

If the civil justice system had been healthy, transparent, and well-policed, it might not have been highjacked, as it was in this case. Everyone should read this book. As Mark Twain said in his book The Gilded Age, 'citizens as a body [must] keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only machinery for its execution, nothing more.'

~Richard H. Underwood, author of CrimeSong: True Crime Stories from Southern Murder Ballads and professor of law at the University of Kentucky

In this well-told tale of perfidy, heroes are few and hard to find. The villains are lawyers, judges, political figures, bureaucrats, drug companies, and medical journals, swirling in an existential problem of modern humanity—we eat too much—and our eternal search for easy answers to difficult questions, often answered by controlled substances. This scam was the precursor of the opioid epidemic that still ravages Kentucky and rural America.

~Al Cross, professor of journalism and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky

An absorbing tale that's sure to hold the interest of those interested in books on corporate crime.

~Library Journal