Pun Salad

This is the third (and perhaps final) book in Scott Turow's series starring lawyer Rusty Sabich. The first, Presumed Innocent, which was a 1980s best-seller, showed Rusty under trial for the murder of his lover, Carolyn Polhemus. The second, Innocent, from 2010, had him suspected of murdering his wife, Barbara. And now, here's Presumed Guilty, where Rusty is… not suspected of anything, but still in a world of legal turmoil.

Presumed Guilty was one of the Edgar "Best Novel" nominees announced in January 2026. I usually try to pick those up at the library; that doesn't always work out, but this time it did.

The series follows Rusty in real time, unlike a lot of series; he's now in his mid-70s, retired from his previous gigs, but still picking up consulting work here and there. He has relocated to a more rural area, fictitious Skageon County (in a fictitious unnamed Midwestern state), and is cohabitating with a local schoolmarm, Bea. They have decided to wed, but haven't set a date.

Stay with me: Bea has an adopted Black son, Aaron, from her previous marriage. He's now in his 20s, and has had problems with the law: specifically, a felony conviction and jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute. But he was holding those drugs for his girlfriend, Mae, with whom he continues to have a chaotic romantic relationship.

In the book's opening chapters, Aaron and Mae head off on a camping expedition, where Aaron hopes to fix their troubles. That doesn't work out. As Rusty reports from his POV, they don't return home as expected. And (since we know this is a mystery/legal thriller), we're pretty sure there was murder involved. And soon enough, there's an arrest, and a trial. And Rusty, against his, and nearly everyone else's, better judgment, finds himself playing defense attorney. His relationships are troubled, too.

It's an excellent page-turner. (544 pages, according to Amazon.) I usually rag on authors for going into minute detail of their characters, their environment, the kind of wood used in the courthouse,… but somehow Turow makes it work.