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PLEADING GUILTY

Instead of cranking out clones of Presumed Innocent, Turow has preferred to take chances—first with The Burden of Proof, which dispensed with his whodunit plot, and now, even more radically, with a foulmouthed, alcoholic lawyer's account of his search for one of his missing partners—and the $5.6 million that vanished with him. If it weren't for the money—redirected from mega-client TransNational Air's accident settlement escrow to a nonexistent firm called Litiplex—nobody at Gage & Griswell would likely notice that their erratic star litigator Bert Kamin hadn't been in lately. As it is, the Management Oversight Committee—ageless Martin Gold, dried-up Wash Thale, and contrary Carl Pagnucci—is so fearful of scaring off TransNational that they press their fading ex-cop partner Mack McCormack, and not the police, into looking for Bert. Mack soon ties Bert in to a false credit card, a secret affair, a scheme to shave points off college basketball games, and a rapidly cooling corpse. As he doubles back to Gage & Griswell to follow Bert's trail, Mack runs afoul of Det. Gino (Pigeyes) Dimonte, the crooked cop his testimony once brought down, and has to enlist the unlikely help of ancient, deeply dishonest attorney Toots Nuccio to stay one jump ahead of his colleagues. Why? Because once Bert and the money have surfaced, separately, the most original phase of Turow's plot has just begun, as Mack struggles to figure out what to do with the cash, his increasingly divided loyalties, and the question of guilt while wandering among a knot of free-lance legal conspirators who change their allegiances more often than their underwear. In switching from Rusty Sabich and Sandy Stern to hard-bitten Mack Malloy, Turow's entering a much more crowded field, and neither Mack nor the byzantine plot he stumbles on is clearly superior to the competition from Grif Stockley, John T. Lescroart, or Clifford Irving. But his legions of fans surely won't miss the chance to see Turow as they've never seen him before.

Pub Date: June 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-374-23457-4

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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BOOK OF THE DEAD

Proceed at your own risk.

Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”

Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.

Proceed at your own risk.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

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