Scott Turow may be one of his generation’s most successful writers of thrillers, but he’s a lot more like William Faulkner than Raymond Chandler. Like the Mississippi master, Turow has set most of his 13 novels in a single fictional place – he calls his Yoknapatawpha Kindle County. But unlike many genre writers, he doesn’t focus on a single hero. Instead, characters from Kindle weave in and out of his books, with different ones getting star turns.
There is a downside to this refreshing novelty: While one of the joys of thrillers is spending lots of time with a particular hero such as Philip Marlowe, Turow creates memorable figures and then largely moves on. So there is special excitement about Turow’s latest novel, Presumed Guilty, which revives one of his most beloved characters, Rožat “Rusty” Sabich. After introducing the lawyer in the blockbuster, career-making thriller Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has only written two other books featuring his beloved character, Innocent (2010) and, now, Presumed Guilty.
The new novel finds the 77-year-old Sabich in semi-retirement, hoping the life he’s making with his fiancée, Bea, will deliver the happiness that has always eluded him. That, of course, can’t happen (who wants to read that book?). Bea’s adopted son, a 22-year-old African-American with a drug conviction, violates his probation and disappears to go camping with his druggy girlfriend, Mae – who is the daughter of the county’s chief prosecutor.
Echoing the real-life murder of Gabby Petito, Aaron returns without Mae, but with her phone and claims that he left her after a fight. When Mae’s strangled body is discovered in the woods, Aaron is the chief suspect. Convinced of Aaron’s guilt, and afraid to represent the accused killer of the powerful prosecutor’s daughter, no local lawyer will defend him. So Aaron’s defense is left to Rusty. To clear his client, Rusty must not only wrestle with the facts of the case but a system that makes it hard to find justice when the accused are often presumed guilty.
“Soon,” Tom Nolan writes in the Wall Street Journal, “he must confront painful revelations about his profession and his closest relationships. Mr. Turow, himself a lawyer, enmeshes readers in a swift narrative full of technical detail, behavioral scrutiny and quick turns of plot.”
“I’ve always been struck by how terrible it is, what a shattering experience, for a parent when a child gets accused of a serious crime,” Turow said. “They think, ‘Is my love for this child so huge that I can’t recognize that he or she is a monster?’”
In an affirming review, Kirkus Reviews calls “the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney.
In her review for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Oline H. Cogdill writes that the novel’s plot “moves briskly as Turow looks at the law, racism, complicated families and, yes, the presumption of guilt. Rusty’s love of the law and his leeriness of its inequities loom large. Turow’s penchant for twists that at first seem odd but are totally believable, and his intimate knowledge of the law, show how the author remains at the top of his writing skills.”
- Read an excerpt from Presumed Guilty
- Listen to Scott discuss the novel with NPR’s Scot Simon
- Watch Scott discuss his approach to writing
Scott Turow’s (Annotated) Top Ten List
1. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916), which first showed me that fiction could articulate what I took as wild and private dreams.
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877), because of the powerful and intimate rendition of these webbed lives.
3. The Rabbit Tetralogy by John Updike - Rabbit Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990) - because of their acute observation and moral courage.
4. Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964), for its extraordinary language, intellectual power and its observations of Chicago.
5. Tell Me A Riddle (1960) by Tillie Olsen, for its inventiveness and power.
6. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844), for its spectacular plot.
7. Collected Works of William Shakespeare, for their miraculous language and extraordinary observations about humanity.
8. The Bear by William Faulkner (1942), for telling the quintessential American story from inside the American mind.
9. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934), an extremely contemporary book that anticipated much of our current preoccupation with gender.
10. The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1933), for its elegance and perfect mystery.