Innocent is Scott Turow’s follow-up to his defining work, Presumed Innocent. Turow artfully weaves a story that incorporates the characters’ history from his prior work without much in the way of spoilers for what happened in Presumed Innocent. If you haven’t read that book, you’ll be fine reading the sequel. Having read it in the ancient past, so far back my memory is fairly fuzzy as to a lot of the details, I felt a huge sense of deja vu reading Innocent. The first three quarters of Innocent follows, near as I can remember, the plot structure of Presumed Innocent. It’s only at the end that the story diverges, in both predictable and unexpected fashions.
Rozhat Rusty
Sabich is now the chief appellate judge for largest city in his state (popularly seen as an analogue for Illinois). He’s running for the state Supreme Court, but the election is nearly two years away. Plagued by an unhappy marriage, he embarks on an affair with his former law clerk, but ends it shortly after it starts. The clerk, Anna Vostic, later takes up with Rusty’s son Nat, also a lawyer. Complicated? Yup. Even more complicated is that a criminal with a case before Sabich knows the judge is seeing someone on the sly. Sabich ain’t really that good at hiding his tracks.
In Presumed Innocent, Sabich’s mistress ended up dead and Sabich was tried for murder by the prosecutor’s office where he worked at the time. That history comes back to bite him in Innocent. Shortly before the election for the Supreme Court, his wife Barbara dies in her sleep. Sabich doesn’t call the authorities for most of the day after he wakes up, sitting with the body instead. That’s suspicious to the prosecuting attorney, Tommy Molto, who was the assistant prosecutor 20 years earlier. So he starts digging, and decides to charge Sabich again.
The authorial tone of the text is much the same as in Presumed Innocent. The reader is led to believe that Sabich is innocent. Turow tells much of the story from Rusty’s point of view without having him reflect much in particular about the circumstances of his wife’s death (thus avoiding telling us explicitly what happened). The result is that I read into it that Sabich is not the kind of person who would commit a murder, without confirmation. And yet, all the evidence, also presumed correct, points at his guilt. Turow is a master at constructing situations that look damning but could also be perfectly innocent too. Particularly if you’ve read Presumed Innocent’s ending, in which case you’ll assume you know who did it and why. I kept thinking, this is the exact same plot, and Turow’s too smart for this, so when and how is it going to change.
The other thing that keeps Innocent interesting is that Turow gives each of his characters motivation that brings them to life. Tommy Molto burns at having been unable to convict a murderer two decades ago, but is resigned to never being able to right that wrong. It makes him extra cautious to take on Sabich again. Sabich for his part deeply loves Nat but never makes much of a personal connection to him. He hides his affair as much to protect Nat as to save his own hide. In fact, one big question throughout is whether or not Rusty will be able to hide the affair from Nat (whether he’s convicted or not).
My biggest beef is with the final chapter of the book. Despite going to great pains to keep Nat from knowing much of the failings of both his parents, Turow uses a conversation between Rusty and Nat at the end to have Rusty finally go back to the day Barbara died. Sandy or Marta Stern (his attorneys) or even Anna, his former fling, would have been more in character.
One minor detail I really liked is that Turow slipped in references to gay relationships as normal and accepted without making a point of it. Anna refers to a housing situation that went bad in her life when a prospective male roommate moved in with a boyfriend because it was cheaper. And Marta Stern refers family life when Helen is away. Simple.
In some ways, I wish that Turow had steered clear of Presumed Innocent. His other books use the characters and events of Presumed Innocent as background without intertwining themselves much. This time, I couldn’t help but repeatedly go back to what I’d previously read. It constrained the story too much. Nevertheless, I think Turow did an excellent job within those constraints and it’s a worthwhile read, but I’ll still think of Presumed Innocent as his peak story.
A few other personal reviews posted on the internet:
- Rhapsody in Books
- Fervent Reader (has spoilers)
- My Random Acts of Reading
Title: Innocent
Author: Scott Turow
Cover creator: Ann Twomey (designer)
Series: Kindle County; 8
Imprint / publisher: Grand Central Publishing / Hachette Livre
Format: Hardcover
Length: 406 p.
Publication date: May 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-446-56242-3
I received Innocent from the publisher free through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. The program does not place constraints on the content of the review other than prescribing a minimum length. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I am donating $15.09 (the cost of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.
