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Reviewed by Louise Leetch
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Remember trudging up the sledding hill when you were a kid, with the rope to your Flexible Flyer slanted across your chest? You trudged and slogged and leaned into the hill just trying to get to the top where you knew adventure awaited. Finally you belly-slapped onto the sled and had the ride of your life flying, twisting, bumping down the hill in one great run.
That’s what reading Scott Turow is like. He tends to be incredibly lawyerly; and the first 200 pages are, if not prolix, certainly protracted. It takes forever to get to the meat of the story but when he finally gets there, you’ll have no way to stop.
Sometimes, though, you can’t go home again; and writing a sequel can be repetitious. Innocent picks up 20 years after Turow’s Presumed Innocent–same great characters, same foolish guy having another affair with another colleague, same guy accused of murder, same defense attorney, same prosecutor; only slightly different outcome. It’s good, just not quite up to Turow’s standard.
Innocent has a great plot proffered by a master of great twists. Rusty Sabich, now Chief Judge of the State Appellate court, has put behind him his acquittal 20 years earlier for the murder of Carolyn Polhemus. He’s preparing for a shoe-in election to the State Supreme Court when, whoops! his wife dies very suddenly.
Now that would be just an unfortunate event for one with her medical history; except Rusty just sits with her dead body for 23 hours before he bothers to call anyone. This just doesn’t sit right with Tommy Molto, who was the prosecutor in Rusty’s murder trial. He and his intense samurai-like assistant, Jim Brand, think something stinks and still believe Rusty guilty of the earlier murder. Molto would love to nail Rusty, but after defense attorney Sandy Stern tore strips off him in that foray, he needs a dead cert case before he’ll bring charges.
Jim Brand has pit bull in his genes and turns up too many ‘coincidences’ for Molto to ignore. So off we go, back into the courtroom–this is the top of the sledding hill and Turow really lets it rip. The machinations of trial lawyers and the quirks and caprices of the law never cease to impress me. Here’s where Turow shines.
Turow had one truly brilliant twist and then threw it away. I thought of a couple great turns this book might take; alas, the author took a different path. That’s the trouble with writing great books; we expect each one to surpass the previous. Still, it’s easy to be a critic; Turow has a lawyer’s expertise. He’s also the pro with eight bestsellers–so I guess that’s why we let him be the author.
Louise Leetch divides her time between Chicago and Wisconsin. Both houses are just crammed with books. She collects her reviews on her GoodReads page.