No doubt many crime fiction readers have eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow’s new legal thriller. I know I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he’s in his 70s.
Rusty, you may recall, was the protagonist of Turow’s first mega-hit, Presumed Innocent, the 1987 bestseller that became a film starring Harrison Ford in 1990. In the current book, his tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished and he’s moved about 100 miles north to Skageon County. He’s living on a lake in a home left to him by a former lover who felt guilty about running out on him. She got a wealthy new husband; he got the house. But he’s found a new love of his own, Bea Housley, the school principal he’s now living with.
Bea is not baggage-free. She has an adopted son, Aaron, in his early 20s who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter), and an irascible father. Aaron is out on parole now, but has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts and no leaving the county. He’s in Bea and Rusty’s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he is off drugs now and pulling his life together.
Mae, a beautiful young woman Aaron’s loved for years, is a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because she’s still on drugs and it’s a violation of his parole, but because she’s unstable and manipulative. She’s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.
The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realises Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people’s advice that she’s not good for him is correct, that he’s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.
But he makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found in her car in a wilderness area. The bruising on her neck suggests she was strangled with a rope. Aaron is devastated. Her family are too, and immediately point to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he’s black and Mae was white lurks in the background. Is it a factor in this rush to accuse him, and is it why they have never approved of Mae and Aaron’s relationship? Mae’s father, Hardy, is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and has the influence to put a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron, and does. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial in neighbouring Marenago County, where Mae’s body was found.
Much of the book is the courtroom drama that unfolds during Aaron’s trial. I liked that part a lot. It’s fascinating to see how the defence team unravel the prosecutor’s evidence, time after time, depending on tiny details you can easily believe another defence lawyer might completely overlook. What sounds devastating at first hearing is, at the very least, open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you’ll find some riveting ones here.
But at 530 pages, there’s a lot of other stuff packed into this book, as well. There’s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognised that he loves Bea and didn’t need it rehashed multiple times. Rusty agonises at great length about whether he should go along with Bea’s wishes and become Aaron’s defence attorney. There are many good reasons he shouldn’t – for one, most of his career was as a prosecutor and heʼs never conducted a murder defence before – and you read all of them, many times. Meanwhile, you know he’s going to do it, or else what is in those 530 pages?
Then, to complicate his emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I frankly found implausible. While the trial scenes fascinated me, I found much of the rest of the story seriously over-written. It’s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You’re so stuffed it’s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.
Also see Witness 8 by Steve Cavanagh or watch the Belgian crime show The Twelve.
Swift Press
Print/Kindle/iBook
£12.99
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
