Word: turow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Scott Turow's legions of readers will immediately understand, this murder is only the beginning of an increasingly labyrinthine story. The Laws of Our Fathers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 534 pages; $26.95) follows Turow's three previous best-selling novels--Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof and Pleading Guilty --in its portrayal of life, death and the search for justice in the Tri-Cities area of Kindle County, an imaginary Rustbelt terrain of remarkable moral and spiritual ambiguity. Once again a sensational trial forms the ostensible center of the novel while Turow demonstrates how inadequately the order in the courtroom mirrors...
This premise is, in other words, preposterous, yet Turow gets away with it. He does so in part by calling attention--before the reader can recognize it and complain--to how unlikely such a reunion of old friends within a single courtroom actually is. When Sonny asks her former lover if he plans to write a column about the upcoming trial, he jokingly responds with a question: "The Big Chill Meets Perry Mason...
That is a glib but not entirely inaccurate description of The Laws of Our Fathers. Turow's handling of the courtroom scenes and legal intricacies remains several cuts above the popular competition, including the creator of Perry Mason. Trial buffs, their numbers swollen by O.J. and Court TV, will find plenty to chew over here, such as Sonny's private ruminations on the bench about hearsay testimony: "The reporters and onlookers seem baffled by the arcana of the rule which allows a witness to testify about what someone said she would be doing in the future but not what...
...industry will surely perk up with the arrival of new novels from the likes of Michael Crichton, Scott Turow, John le Carre and Tom Clancy (see box). But rival publishers are probably not happy knowing that within a month there will be two more Stephen King books on the market. In another bit of publishing gimmickry, both novels--which share the same cast of characters in skewed, slightly different roles--will be published the same day, Sept. 24. One is Desperation (Viking; 688 pages; $27.95). The other is The Regulators, written under King's occasional nom de plume, Richard Bachman...
...Turow, who received his J.D. in 1978, wrote his first novel, One-L, during his years at the Law School. Berman's novel was just released nationwide by Warner Books and will be in bookstores...