Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on January 14, 2025

My favorite novels about the nature of law and justice are The Ox-Bow Incident and A Covenant with Death. My favorite novels that mock the legal system are Bleak House and A Frolic of His Own. My favorite novel about a trial is To Kill a Mockingbird. My favorite legal thriller is Presumed Innocent. I highly recommend them all.

Published in 1987, Presumed Innocent told the story of Rusty Sabin, a prosecutor who was wrongly accused of killing an illicit lover. Sabin, by then an appellate judge, was accused of killing his wife in the follow-up novel, 2010’s Innocent. Presumed Guilty marks Sabin’s third starring role, this time as a defense attorney rather than a defendant.

The categories I invented for my list of favorite novels about the law overlap. All are represented in Presumed Guilty. Sabin entertains the reader with his hard-earned opinions about the relationship between law and justice. At times, the novel mocks the legal system, although Scott Turow does so by depicting it accurately. The system too often mocks itself.

Rusty Sabin respects the law but has been known to break it. He is easily forgiven for harmless and well-intended transgressions. Given his experiences, Sabin harbors an understandable contempt for those who place the freedom of others at risk by undermining rights that are essential to a fair trial.

Through Sabin, Turow spotlights the criminal justice system’s imperfections and explains why they impair an accused’s opportunity to have a fair shake against the government. Without lecturing, he identifies social problems — racism, the growing belief that facts are whatever you want them to be — and illustrates how they stain the justice system.

Turow also mocks prosecutors who see themselves as avenging warriors, a self-important conception that excuses any violation of rules that stand in the way of a conviction. Turow reminds us that prosecutors have a dark history of excluding Blacks from juries, hiding exculpatory evidence, and violating court orders to keep silent about inadmissible evidence, among other offenses.

While Presumed Guilty thus earns praise for its astute analysis of a flawed legal system, it also excels as a legal thriller. It isn’t as fresh or astonishing as Presumed Innocent, but it tells a compelling story that, like many legal thrillers, centers upon a whodunit mystery. Is the defendant guilty and, if not, can the reader identify the true culprit? As is often the case in the real world, evidence is murky and open to interpretation. Turow lets the suspense build before the reader learns the (somewhat) surprising and (mostly) plausible truth.

Because this is how Sabin’s life has gone, the story centers on a crime that touches his family. Sabin has retired and is living in a quiet place outside of Kindle County. He lives with Bea and her adopted son Aaron. On Sabin’s 75th birthday, Bea agreed to marry him, but they haven’t set a date.

Aaron is a 22-year-old Black man who abused drugs during his teens. He was joined in that addiction by Mae Potter, with whom he fell madly in love. Mae has a streak of wildness that, combined with narcissism, compulsive behavior, and moments of deep depression, make her a difficult girlfriend and a challenge to her family’s high place in the county’s social hierarchy.

Mae’s grandfather, Mansfield “Mansy” Potter, is Sabin’s best friend in the county. Mae’s father, Harrison “Hardy” Potter, is the county’s prosecuting attorney. Sabin tolerates Hardy for the sake of his friendship with Hardy’s father.

Aaron is on probation because he was arrested while holding Mae’s drugs. He isn’t allowed to leave the county. Sabin becomes concerned when Aaron is late returning from a camping trip with Mae. He will be forced to report Aaron’s absence if he doesn’t come home. Although Aaron finally returns, Mae doesn’t. Nor does Aaron seem overly concerned about her disappearance.

Aaron will be charged with Mae’s murder when her decomposing body is found in her wrecked car some weeks later. It doesn’t help that he apparently flees when the body is discovered, only to be arrested when he makes a mysterious appearance at the place where Mae’s body was found. Was he there to destroy evidence, as the prosecutor contends?

A pathologist concludes that Mae died of strangulation. Against his better judgment, Sabin agrees to represent Aaron for lack of a more skilled and affordable alternative. I doubt any lawyer who has never defended a murder case would start by representing his fiancé’s adopted son, but Turow creates a background that makes the representation plausible, if not inevitable. Anyway, the story just wouldn’t be as good if Sabin didn’t defend the case.

Turow plants clues that could incriminate other suspects, including Hardy and Bea. Sabin seizes the clues to create doubt in the prosecution’s case. The reader will use them to ponder the killer’s identity — unless Mae committed suicide, a possibility that the forensic evidence suggests. But how does that theory account for the absence of a rope around her neck when it was recovered from the wrecked car? And how did a similar rope end up in Sabin’s garage?

Courtroom scenes make or break legal thrillers. Turow is the genre’s master of capturing the drama of a riveting cross-examination. He also reveals the “inside baseball” of criminal defense, the strategic choices that lawyers make minute-by-minute in response to the changing trial dynamic. Courtroom politics are central to the story, given the prosecutor’s contempt for the judge — and for the law when it gets in the way of his self-righteous belief that only he is the true arbiter of justice.

Aaron might be Turow’s most sympathetic character. He has a tough but credible backstory. He has learned that he needs to embrace truths rather than run from them. That guiding principle makes him want to testify, pitting him against Sabin’s fear that the jury will want to convict him as soon as it learns about his history of drug abuse and probation violations.

This is Turow’s best novel since Presumed Innocent. It mixes a credible mystery with a suspenseful trial that leads to surprising revelations. Sabin digs deep within himself to resolve conflicting feelings about his relationships with Bea, Mansy, and Aaron. The story reveals powerful truths about the law but doesn’t let them slow the pace of an engaging story.

RECOMMENDED

Suspect by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 27, 2022

Scott Turow’s latest legal thriller is set, as usual, in fictional Kindle County, Illinois. Suspect differs from many of Turow’s novels in that the narrator/protagonist is not a lawyer. Clarice Granum, known to her boss as Pinky, is a bisexual nonconformist who dropped out of the police academy and took a job as an investigator for Rik Dudek, a 52-year-old lawyer in Highland Isle.

Rik is representing Lucia Gomez-Barrera, the chief of police in Highland Isle, in a hearing before a commission that will decide whether she should keep her job. Three male police officers have accused her of demanding sexual favors in exchange for promotions. One of the officers has retired and taken a position with Moritz Vojczek, a former cop turned property developer who is known locally as the Ritz. Lucia encouraged the Ritz’s resignation from the force and he has long resented the loss of his pension, although he has achieved enormous wealth and doesn’t need it.

Lucia suspects the Ritz of orchestrating the accusations. While two of the accusers are sleazy, one is squeaky clean. Rik proves his ability as a trial lawyer when he cross-examines the accusers, assisted by evidence that Pinky has uncovered. The hearing seems to be going sideways, however, when a photo turns up that appears to show one of the cops going down on Lucia while she’s sitting in her office. Lucia’s life might go sideways when one of her accusers dies under suspicious circumstances.

In a subplot that eventually merges with the main plot, Pinky becomes curious about a guy in a neighboring apartment who is keeping odd hours. Pinky gets close to the guy because he’s intriguing — maybe he’s a spy? — creating the possibility of a dangerous liaison. Pinky also needs to work out her relationship with a cop she once dated, a woman who seems to be carrying a torch for her. Since the cop is involved in a death investigation and since Lucia is a suspect, Pinky can’t serve Lucia’s needs without addressing the cop’s feeling of abandonment or rejection.

Suspect lacks the suspense and intricate plotting of Turow’s best work, but the cross-examinations are fun. The initial focus on sexual harassment rather than criminal defense makes the story fresh. Rik doesn’t have much personality but Pinky has plenty, at least if an unwillingness to settle down and an unquenchable willingness to have sex count as a personality. The story proceeds steadily to an unsurprising conclusion, but the path is sufficiently twisty to hold a reader’s interest.

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Testimony by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on May 16, 2017

Testimony is the first legal thriller I’ve read that focuses on the International Criminal Court. It is primarily fiction that is only based on fact at the edges of the story, including the ill-considered diversion of arms from Bosnia to Iraq that probably ended up in the hands of terrorists. The guts of the story, however, are pure fiction, written to Scott Turow’s usual standard of detail and deception.

Bill “Boom” Ten Boom has resigned from his Kindle County law firm and left his family behind to prosecute war crimes. In 2004, a group of soldiers allegedly wiped out a village inhabited by 400 Roma in Bosnia. The nearest soldiers happened to be Americans, and the massacre is rumored to have been an act of retaliation for the deaths of American soldiers in a failed attempt to capture a Serbian leader named Kajevic, a war criminal on the order of Slobodan Milošević.

In 2015, a friend of Boom who works for one of America’s spy agencies invites Boom to prosecute the case, which (in the spy’s view) means proving that the killers were not Americans. The thought is that having an American lead the investigation will prevent “some yahoo in Congress” from triggering an international crisis because the ICC is investigating a crime in which American soldiers are the suspected culprits.

Who killed the Roma? A furtive group working for Kajevic? American soldiers? Or, as some insist, did the massacre never happen? Boom’s investigation takes him from the Hague to Washington to Bosnia, placing him in danger while challenging the reader to figure out who is threatening Boom and what really happened to the Roma. Of course, as is common in Scott Turow’s work, the answer requires the careful dismantling of a cover-up.

Boom becomes involved in relationships with a couple of women during the course of the novel. The relationship drama is integral to the story while never threatening to overwhelm the legal drama. While he’s in Holland, Boom also learns something dramatic about his roots, another layer that interweaves with but doesn’t overwhelm the central story.

There are political overtones to the story, but they transcend party politics to ask fundamental questions about the nature of political and military leadership. The novel touches on the colossal political blunder that America made in invading Iraq, and the series of military and political blunders that followed. It also illustrates the debate between those who believe that America should not be subject to international law (among other reasons, because they perceive American soldiers as a likely target of persecution) and those who believe that America should avoid the double standard of judging other countries while being unwilling to be judged by them. The rule of law, after all, should apply equally to everyone, including Americans.

Those issues aside, this is fundamentally a legal thriller rather than a political story. Turow follows Boom and the other characters as they interview, investigate, excavate, and examine the evidence to see where it leads. The book is a model of how all criminal investigations should proceed, as investigators strive to find the truth, not to prove that their pet theory is accurate.

Turow’s characters, as always, have depth and substance. The story moves quickly without glossing over the fact that complex criminal investigations are painstaking affairs. The original plot and the strong characters make this one of the better novels that Turow has written in recent years.

RECOMMENDED

Identical by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on October 15, 2013

The identical twin crime novel has been done so often it's become a cliché, but Scott Turow knows that. Just when I thought I had it figured out and was disappointed that the story followed an obvious path, the plot twisted. Then it twisted again, becoming a different story altogether. Kudos to Turow for taking a familiar plot device and doing something new with it. Unlike some of Turow's other novels, Identical isn't a courtroom thriller. It is instead a novel about the intersection of politics and law. That's been done before too, but few writers do it better than Turow. Identical is set in the familiar legal terrain of Kindle County and features several secondary characters (including Sandy Stern) who are well known to Turow's fans.

Paul Gianis is a brand new attorney who, as the novel opens in 1982, will soon become a prosecutor in Kindle County. Paul is attending a picnic where several of the novel's principle characters are gathered, including Paul's twin brother Cass, his mother Lidia, his brother's caustic girlfriend Dita, and Dita's father, Zeus Kronen. After warning us that the day of the picnic will change Paul's life, Scott Turow jumps ahead to a 2008 parole hearing, where we meet Dita's brother, Hal Kronen, a wealthy real estate developer. Cass has nearly finished serving his sentence for Dita's murder. Also attending the hearing are Kronen's vice president for security, Evon Miller, and his private investigator, Tim Brodie. Paul, having departed the prosecutor's office for a lucrative personal injury practice, is now the majority leader in the state senate and a candidate for mayor. He isn't happy when Kronen publicly accuses him of playing a role in Dita's murder, an accusation that threatens to derail his campaign if Paul doesn't neutralize it.

Turow crams a lot of story into a few pages, and that's just the beginning. Turow sets up the central mystery, common to identical twin crime novels, early on: which twin did what? Occasional flashbacks to 1982 lead to an eventual answer. The answer is complicated by a present day plot twist (revealed about two-thirds in) that is relatively obvious, but Turow clearly intends the reader to guess some of what's happening. At roughly the same two-thirds point, Turow shocks the reader with several revelations that force Miller and Brodie (and the reader) to rethink the mystery.

The meat of the novel comes after Paul files a lawsuit for defamation against Kronen. Much of the story is about dirty politics and the ability of people with money to smear candidates they dislike. Turow adds a bit of drama to each character's life without sidetracking the main story, which contains enough family drama to drive a multigenerational saga.

Identical isn't quite as clever as Turow's best novels, but lesser Turow is still better than most writers of legal thrillers can manage. The story kept me guessing and my attention never wavered. Strong characters and a strong plot are enough to earn Identical a strong recommendation, even if it isn't my favorite Turow.

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