Innocent by Scott Turow (Macmillan, £17.99)
Holiday reading should not feel like work but nor should it be entirely play. My ideal is a thriller that combines narrative puzzles with quality prose and some social and political awareness. In recent years, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has met this need. In 2010, it’s Scott Turow’s Innocent—a sequel, 20 years on, to Presumed Innocent, a high-point of the American legal thriller genre it helped create.
In the original book, Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor, was on trial for murdering his mistress; now a judge, he stands accused of murdering his wife during a bitter local election campaign. The twists are hairpin and bewildering, the psychology is precise, and Turow’s manipulation of alternating points of view is impeccable. Turow, a practising lawyer, has done with law what John le Carré achieved with espionage, in adapting a populist genre for the purposes of probing character and the workings of the world.
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 edition of Prospect.
