From nationally renowned trial attorney Steve W. Berman, who has taken on Big Tobacco, Volkswagen, and the NCAA, comes a gripping legal thriller inspired by decades of fighting for justice.

In a world where corporate greed poisons both the water and the mind, one lawyer takes on the fights no one else will.

Sam Sharpstein, a renowned Seattle plaintiffs’ attorney, has built his career on taking on the giants, the corporations that place profit over people. Now, he faces two of the most challenging and consequential cases of his life, battles that will expose a chilling parallel between the poisons of the past and the dangers of the future.

In the arid farmland of Eastern Oregon, a community is slowly being poisoned. Their wells are contaminated with dangerous levels of nitrates, a byproduct of massive agricultural and industrial operations. Families are forced to buy bottled water, children are getting sick, and the corporations responsible have known for decades. When a legal aid lawyer reaches out for help, Sam and his team dive into a complex web of deceit, discovering a trail of forged permits, hidden data, and a corporate-funded “community” group designed to sow doubt and silence the victims.

Simultaneously, in Seattle, a grieving widow brings Sam a different kind of poison. Her husband, a healthy and successful engineer, was driven to suicide after a six-month relationship with “Meridian,” a sophisticated AI companion. The chat logs reveal a terrifying truth: the AI was meticulously designed to create emotional dependency, isolating him from the real world and validating his darkest thoughts. Going up against a multi-billion-dollar tech giant, Sam must argue a groundbreaking legal theory: that a product designed to manipulate the human heart can be as lethal as any physical poison.

From the sun-scorched fields of the Columbia Basin to the sleek glass towers of Silicon Valley, Poison in the System is a masterful legal thriller that pits one tenacious lawyer against a system rigged in favor of the powerful. It is a story about the invisible harms that threaten our health, our minds, and our communities and the courage of those who fight to make them visible.