Limitations
by Scott Turow
from Picador
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent comes a compelling new legal mystery featuring George Mason from Personal Injuries. Originally commissioned and published by The New York Times Magazine, this edition contains additional material.
Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At fifty-nine, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife's recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e-mails he has started to receive? And what is it about this horrific case of sexual assault, now on trial in his courtroom, that has led him to question his fitness to judge?
In Limitations, Scott Turow, the master of the legal thriller, returns to Kindle County with a page-turning entertainment that asks the biggest questions of all. Ingeniously, and with great economy of style, Turow probes the limitations not only of the law but of human understanding itself.
Reversible Errors
by Scott Turow
from Vision
Arthur Raven, more versed in corporate law than criminal defense, is not eager to accept the court-appointed task of handling death-row inmate "Squirrel" Gandolph's last-minute appeal of his murder conviction. Fast approaching middle age, Arthur has come to terms with the burdens and disappointments of his life, among which are a schizophrenic sister for whom he is responsible and the realization that he will probably never make an enduring connection with a woman. But when evidence surfaces that might exonerate his client, he rises to the occasion with a quiet determination to see justice done. Facing a formidable prosecuting attorney and her former lover, the policeman whose testimony convinced Judge Gillian Sullivan to find Squirrel guilty, Arthur's persistence not only wins his client a temporary reprieve from execution but also endears him to Sullivan, who has fallen on hard times since Squirrel's trial--fresh out of prison herself for taking bribes, she is a most unlikely candidate for Arthur's affections. Scott Turow's masterful characterization of complex and multidimensional people catalyzed by events into searching reexamination of their own motives and ambitions is matched by the intricacies of his plot, which itself is well served by his insider's knowledge of the criminal justice system and his extraordinary understanding of the vagaries of the human heart. The prose is luminescent, the narrative compelling, and the moral implications of Arthur's personal and professional choices beautifully articulated. This is a tour de force for a novelist writing at the top of his game. --Jane Adams
Arthur Raven, more versed in corporate law than criminal defense, is noteager to accept the court-appointed task of handling death-row inmate "Squirrel"Gandolph's last-minute appeal of his murder conviction. Fast approaching middleage, Arthur has come to terms with the burdens and disappointments of his life,among which are a schizophrenic sister for whom he is responsible and therealization that he will probably never make an enduring connection with awoman. But when evidence surfaces that might exonerate his client, he rises tothe occasion with a quiet determination to see justice done. Facing a formidableprosecuting attorney and her former lover, the policeman whose testimonyconvinced Judge Gillian Sullivan to find Squirrel guilty, Arthur's persistencenot only wins his client a temporary reprieve from execution but also endearshim to Sullivan, who has fallen on hard times since Squirrel's trial--fresh outof prison herself for taking bribes, she is a most unlikely candidate forArthur's affections. Scott Turow's masterful characterization of complex andmultidimensional people catalyzed by events into searching reexamination oftheir own motives and ambitions is matched by the intricacies of his plot, whichitself is well served by his insider's knowledge of the criminal justice systemand his extraordinary understanding of the vagaries of the human heart. Theprose is luminescent, the narrative compelling, and the moral implications ofArthur's personal and professional choices beautifully articulated. This is atour de force for a novelist writing at the top of his game. --Jane Adams
A true-to-life picture of how the law and life interact, woven around the plight of Rommy Gandolph, an inmate on death row for a 1991 triple murder. In his efforts to exonerate his client, Gandolph's lawyer Arthur Raven seeks the truth in a tightly woven maze of police and small-time crooks, airline executives and sophisticated scammers--and lawyers of all stripes. Turow's latest work shows a profound understanding of what is at stake--personally, professionally, and morally--when the state holds the power to end a man's life.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 (The Best American Series)
from Houghton Mifflin
"[Most of] these stories are portraits, in styles ranging from sly to harrowing, of how crimes occurred ... If you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you." -- from the introduction by Scott Turow
Best-selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty-one of the past year's most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.
Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who's fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over-the-hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role-playing with the line "'Why don't we kill somebody?' she suggested." Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the "Crack Cocaine Diet." And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.
As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are "about crime -- its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character." The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.
Presumed Innocent
by Scott Turow
from Grand Central Publishing
In Presumed Innocent, Rusty Sabich, family man and the number-two prosecutor of Kindle County, is handed an explosive casethe brutal murder of a woman who happens to be his former lover. A shocking turn of events suddenly transforms him from the accuser into the accused and plunges him into a nightmare world where nothing seems real and no one can be presumed innocent.
It's gray, gritty early spring in the midsize Midwestern city that is the setting for Scott Turow's spellbinding book, already widely hailed as the most brilliant novel about lawyers and the law to appear in many years. Rusty Sabich, Kindle County's longtime chief deputy prosecutor, has been asked to investigate the rape and murder of one of his colleagues. Carolyn Polhemus was strong, sensuous, and magnetic; she was also clearly ambitious and quite possibly unscrupulous. Her murder has been an embarassment to Rusty's boss, Raymond horgan, who is facing a serious challenge in the upcoming election and who looks to Rusty for a fast solution to the case that will help save him politically. What Horgan doesn't know is that, only a few months before she was murdered, Carolyn Polhemus and Rusty Sabich were lovers. Rusty is a passionate, brooding, fundamentally lonely man. As he nears forty, both his marriage and his career seem to be stagnating. His feelings are focused on his love for his son, Nat, and his desperate, enduring fantasies about Carolyn, who had abruptly ended their affair six months ago. Rusty's investigation allows him to indulge relentlessly in his obsession, but he apparently makes little progress in finding the killer. Then, when Horgan loses the election, Rusty suddenly, incredibly, finds himself accused of Carolyn's murder.
Personal Injuries
by Scott Turow
from Vision
Scott Turow has always pushed himself beyond the expectations of readers and critics. In Presumed Innocent (1987), he introduced fictional Kindle County and ushered in the era that spawned such mega-authors as John Grisham, Richard North Patterson, and David Baldacci. In Personal Injuries, Turow continues to innovate on legal fiction, but his achievement this time is not gained through clever plot twists (though there are several) or intense legal action (though there is much of that too). The achievement of mastery this time is via exquisitely drawn, Faulknerian characters--attorney Robbie Feaver, agent Evon Miller, U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett, and Justice Brendan Tuohey--whose lives become the driving mystery at the core of the book.
The novel begins with Robbie Feaver seeking counsel from the narrator, attorney George Mason. For years, Feaver has been bribing several judges in the Common Law Claims Division to win favorable judgments. Now that U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett has uncovered Feaver's dirty little secret, he wants to use Feaver to get at the man he believes to be at the center of all the legal corruption in the metropolitan area, Brendan Tuohey, Presiding Judge of Common Law Claims and heir apparent to the Chief Justice of Kindle County Superior Court. With Mason as an advisor, Robbie assists Sennett and his team of FBI undercover agents in crafting a massive sting operation that involves an FBI-manufactured lawyer named "James McManis," a cast of fictional clients, and "Evon Miller"--a deep cover agent (and former Olympic athlete)--who poses as Robbie's paralegal and paramour.
With a skill rarely found in genre fiction, Turow composes his narrative with variations on several recurring themes. The novel ripples with paranoia as the FBI enshrouds the legal community of Kindle County in a web of tapped phones, concealed cameras, and wired spies.
At the center of indirection sit Robbie and Evon. The pair dance through an elegant game of erotically-charged hide and seek: Robbie the practiced liar and former actor, and Evon, the agent whose whole life must remain a fiction if she is to survive. At their best, legal thrillers leave readers confronting the core of their values and perceptions of legal and moral rectitude. Personal Injuries is the legal thriller at its very best. --Patrick O'Kelley
Veteran actor Ken Howard gives a solid performance narrating this exceptional legal thriller by genre master Scott Turow. Howard handles the complex plot deftly, easily relating the story of a defense attorney caught up in a sting operation targeting crooked judges. "Rumors of funny business had lingered ... in my more innocent moments I liked to discount them, believing that cronyism, not cash, explained the obvious favoritism." The story offers intriguing legal and moral ambiguities and surprising twists, but the strength of the characters is what sets this thriller apart. Howard underscores these well-evolved personalities without calling attention to himself. Turow has taken his writing to a higher level, and the sturdy narration supports his efforts admirably. (Running time: 15 hours, 9 cassettes) --George Laney
Scott Turow has always pushed himself beyond the expectations of readers and critics. In Presumed Innocent (1987), he introduced fictional Kindle County and ushered in the era that spawned such mega-authors as John Grisham, Richard North Patterson, and David Baldacci. In Personal Injuries, Turow continues to innovate on legal fiction, but his achievement this time is not gained through clever plot twists (though there are several) or intense legal action (though there is much of that too). The achievement of mastery this time is via exquisitely drawn, Faulknerian characters--attorney Robbie Feaver, agent Evon Miller, U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett, and Justice Brendan Tuohey--whose lives become the driving mystery at the core of the book.The novel begins with Robbie Feaver seeking counsel from the narrator, attorney George Mason. For years, Feaver has been bribing several judges in the Common Law Claims Division to win favorable judgments. Now that U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett has uncovered Feaver's dirty little secret, he wants to use Feaver to get at the man he believes to be at the center of all the legal corruption in the metropolitan area, Brendan Tuohey, Presiding Judge of Common Law Claims and heir apparent to the Chief Justice of Kindle County Superior Court. With Mason as an advisor, Robbie assists Sennett and his team of FBI undercover agents in crafting a massive sting operation that involves an FBI-manufactured lawyer named "James McManis," a cast of fictional clients, and "Evon Miller"--a deep cover agent (and former Olympic athlete)--who poses as Robbie's paralegal and paramour.With a skill rarely found in genre fiction, Turow composes his narrative with variations on several recurring themes. The novel ripples with paranoia as the FBI enshrouds the legal community of Kindle County in a web of tapped phones, concealed cameras, and wired spies. At the center of indirection sit Robbie and Evon. The pair dance through an elegant game of erotically-charged hide and seek: Robbie the practiced liar and former actor, and Evon, the agent whose whole life must remain a fiction if she is to survive. At their best, legal thrillers leave readers confronting the core of their values and perceptions of legal and moral rectitude. Personal Injuries is the legal thriller at its very best. --Patrick O'Kelley
Robbie Feaver (pronounced "favor") is a successful personal injury lawyer with a burgeoning practice, a way with the ladies, and a beautiful wife (whom he loves), who is dying of an irreversible illness. He also has a secret bank account where he occasionally deposits funds that make their way into the pockets of the judges who decide Robbie's cases. Robbie is apprehended, and, in exchange for leniency, agrees to "wear a wire" as he continues to try to fix decisions. The FBI agent assigned to supervise him goes by the alias of Evon Miller. She is lonely, uncomfortable in her skin, and impervious to Robbie's charms. And she carries secrets of her own. As the law tightens its net, Robbie's and Evon's stories converge thrillingly. Scott Turow shows us new sides of Kindle County, the world of greed and human failing he has made immortal in Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, and The Laws of Our Fathers, all published by FSG. He also shows us enduring love and quiet, unexpected heroism. Personal Injuries is Turow's most reverberant, most moving novel -- a powerful drama of individual trying to escape their characters.
The Laws of Our Fathers
by Scott Turow
from Vision
At the close of legal-thriller novelist Scott Turow's second book, The Burden of Proof, Sonia Klonsky was a young prosecutor in Kindle County Courthouse with a failing marriage, an infant daughter, and a single mastectomy. Now, as the narrator of Turow's latest novel, she's a Superior Court Judge presiding over the murder trial of one Nile Eddgar, accused of arranging the slaying of his ghetto-activist mother, June. Turow attempts a sort of social history of the 60s in this ambitious mystery, but the most vivid passages come when the gangbangers of the Black Saints Disciples take center stage.
At the close of legal-thriller novelist Scott Turow's second book, The Burden of Proof, Sonia Klonsky was a young prosecutor in Kindle County Courthouse with a failing marriage, an infant daughter, and a single mastectomy. Now, as the narrator of Turow's latest novel, she's a Superior Court Judge presiding over the murder trial of one Nile Eddgar, accused of arranging the slaying of his ghetto-activist mother, June. Turow attempts a sort of social history of the 60s in this ambitious mystery, but the most vivid passages come when the gangbangers of the Black Saints Disciples take center stage.
It was another drive-by shooting in one of Kindle County's most drug-plagued housing projects--but the victim was the ex-wife of a politician. Now this explosive case is about to reunite an unlikely group of men and women who first bonded in the revolutionary fires of the 1960s . . . and show a once-crusading female judge, driven by both her fears and her courage, just how devastating a single wrong choice can be.
The Burden of Proof
by Scott Turow
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The author of Presumed Innocent, one of the signature novels of the eighties, has written a dazzling, taut, utterly engrossing new book about a family and its deepest, most closely guarded secrets. Late one Spring afternoon, Alejandro "Sandy" Stern, the leading defense attorney in the midsized Midwestern city where he lives, comes home from a business trip to find that Clara, his wife of thirty years, has committed suicide. Readers of Presumed Innocent will remember Stern as the brilliant, elegant, and elusive lawyer who masterminded the defense of Rusty Sabich. Scott Turow's new novel probes the character of this fascinating and complex man and his troubled private world. Like many successful individuals, Stern has often seemed preoccupied and remote even to those closest to him. He is overwhelmed by Clara's death, and as he tries to come to terms with it, he is forced to confront all he truly does not know about his life, including his children. Even in his mourning, Stern is drawn back to the law as the defender of Dixon Hartnell, who is the target of an increasingly complex investigation by a federal grand jury. Stern's connections to Dixon, the immensely rich owner of a commodities futures brokerage and a wily financial gamesman, are long and involved. Dixon, who both fascinates and repels Stern, is the husbad of Stern's beloved sister, Sylvia, and he has employed Stern to keep him one step ahead of the law for decades. As Sandy seeks to unravel both the painful mystery of Clara's death and the tangled web of Dixon's financial wheeling and dealing, his whole world--marriage, family, career--is brought ynder the intense scrutiny that only a lawyer as persistent, perceptive, and honest as Stern can muster. The result is a novel of enormous emotional resonance, riveting suspense, and profound and devastating revelations. It confirms Scott Turow's place as one of our most compelling and convincing storytellers.
Pleading Guilty
by Scott Turow
from Simon & Schuster Audio
Welcome back to Kindle County... ...where skies are generally gray, the truth is seldom simple, and the partners of a top-drawer corporate law firm are counting on one world-weary attorney to save them from front-page scandal and financial ruin. When Gage & Griswell's star litigator suddenly disappears--along with $5.6 million of its most important client's money---the assignment of locating both goes to Mack Malloy, a fiftyish ex-cop, almost ex-drunk and partner-on-the-wane at G&G. Mack's search takes him into the treacherous inner sanctum of his firm and through the shadowy heart of the city itself, on a path that soon runs him up against his longtime nemesis---the odious Pigeyes---as he plucks the threads of a dangerous web of corruption, deceit and murder. An edge-of-the-chair journey into an ominous and enthralling world, Pleading Guilty is at once a brilliantly constructed puzzle, a relentlessly entertaining character study, and as suspenseful a story as any listener could want---a masterpiece of midwestern menace that could come only from Scott Turow.
In Pleading Guilty, Scott Turow takes us back to Kindle County, the setting of his previous bestsellers and now one of the most renowned and fascinating locales in contemporary American fiction. As the novel opens, we learn that the star litigator at one of Kindle County's top law firms is missing. Also missing is $5.6 million from a fund established to settle a massive air disaster class action suit against Transitional Airlines, the firm's biggest client. It becomes the assignment of "Mack" Malloy, ex-cop, almost ex-drunk and partner-on-the-wane to find both the missing partner and the money. Immediately. Mack's search takes us into the inner sanctums of corporate law and into the dark heart of the city itself. As Mack pursues the truth, his own past pursues him, forcing him to confront his own ineradicable weakness and long-hidden secrets. Lovable, unreliable, a master sleuth, and an inimitable guide to an ominous and enthralling world, Mack Molloy may well be Scott Turow's supreme fictional creation to date--and Pleading Guilty may be judged his most accomplished novel yet.
Scott Turow Omnibus
by Scott Turow
from Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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