Pun Salad

Back in the 1980s I read the legal thriller/mystery Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, his first novel. At the time, it was a blockbuster. It got made into a Harrison Ford movie!

I read maybe a couple more Turow novels after that, but kind of lost interest.

But a few weeks ago, I noticed that Turow's latest novel Presumed Guilty was nominated for a "Best Novel" Edgar Award. And (as it turns out) the protagonist from that first book, lawyer Rusty Sabich, is featured in it.

Ah, but (also as it turns out) this book, Innocent, came out back in 2010, also featuring Rusty. So I decided I'd better read this first.

[By the way, reader, if you're wondering if you have to read Presumed Innocent before Innocent, I'd say no, you don't have to. I don't think there are any spoilers for that book in this one. I recommend it though.]

Page one spoiler: Rusty finds his wife, Barbara, unexpectedly dead next to him in bed. Inexplicably, he waits for nearly a day before even notifying their (now grown) son, Nat about her death. Why? His explanations are poor. And it doesn't take long before suspicion falls upon him. You see, in that previous book, Rusty was put on trial for the murder of a different woman, but the prosecutors failed to make their case. Could he be trying to get away with murder again?

The book's style is tricky, some chapters written with a few different first-person narrators. And some chapters third-person. There's also some jumping back-and-forth in time. What is completely obvious is that Rusty isn't telling us all he knows in his narrative. (Geez, just like that first book.)

And there's a lot of (what I call) navel-gazing, even in the third person. We get to know a lot about everyone's motivations, flaws, opinions, etc. Just not everything.

Plot twists abound; there's always one around the corner. Just when you thought things couldn't get any more byzantine, another trap door opens under your feet. Turow is a master at that.

Reader, I thought I had a good idea about What Really Happened. I didn't.