Word: carolyne
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...plot. Rusty Sabich, 39, is the chief deputy prosecutor of Kindle County, somewhere in the Middle West. Raymond Horgan, his boss and mentor for the past twelve years, faces a re- election battle undermined by a stroke of bad news. A little less than three weeks before the voting, Carolyn Polhemus, a member of Horgan's staff and Rusty's colleague, has been found murdered in gruesome, suggestive circumstances: nude, bound, apparently raped. Horgan's political opponents create a furor, and the local papers and TV stations chime in: if brutal crime can reach even the chief prosecutor's office...
...killed Carolyn Polhemus? There is a simple answer to that question, of course, and Presumed Innocent eventually provides it. But the novel has aspirations well beyond those of the run-of-the-mill whodunit. Turow uses Carolyn's grotesque death as a means of exposing the trail of municipal corruption that has spread through Kindle County. The issue is not merely ! whether a murderer will be brought to justice but whether public institutions and their guardians are any longer capable of finding the truth...
...jousting between prosecution and defense, the psychological intricacies of jury selection, the subtle influence a judge can exercise on the outcome of a case, all are convincingly and grippingly portrayed. And the irony behind these elaborate proceedings is that they almost certainly have no bearing on the actuality of Carolyn's death...
...occasional delusions of Dostoyevsky. "I have seen so much," he begins at one point, brooding over his liaison with the murder victim, and then recites a litany of misery, concluding, "The lights go out, grow dim. And a soul can stand only so much darkness. I reached for Carolyn." As excuses for adultery go, Rusty's sounds more than a little pretentious...
...passion, once directed only toward the attainment of certain specific objectives--a career, a child, a lover--is now dispersed, but not diminished. Rusty is obsessed with Carolyn, with the professional details of his case, with his son, with the fear that the intensity of his obsessions may never abate...