Presumed Innocent (Kindle County Legal Thriller, #1) in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Oct 16, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary, crime, fiction, novels, mystery, suspense, ultimate-reading-list

I ultimately found this book disappointing given the high expectations I started with. Blurbs trumpeted this book as a "literary" novel of the kind "that transcend their genre" and claimed Turow was comparable to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Certainly the prose was stronger than what I expect from a popular thriller. It's told first person present tense and it often reads lyrically, with touches of an elegiacal tone. Our narrator is Chief Deputy prosecutor Rusty Sabich. As the novel be I ultimately found this book disappointing given the high expectations I started with. Blurbs trumpeted this book as a "literary" novel of the kind "that transcend their genre" and claimed Turow was comparable to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Certainly the prose was stronger than what I expect from a popular thriller. It's told first person present tense and it often reads lyrically, with touches of an elegiacal tone. Our narrator is Chief Deputy prosecutor Rusty Sabich. As the novel begins he's in the midst of a homicide investigation into the murder of Carolyn Polhemus that happened just three days ago while his boss the District Attorney is eighteen days away from a contentious primary. Sabich is a married man and Carolyn was both a fellow prosecutor and an ex-lover he was still obsessed with at the time of her murder.

Besides the strong writing, I was struck by how credibly Turow wrote of what it's like to work at a district attorney's office in a big American City. It's set in the fictional "Kindle County" but seems modeled on Chicago. Turow isn't just a law school graduate or former trial attorney but a former prosecutor. I recently tried a legal thriller by Lescroart where the legal aspects had so little credibility I stopped reading by page 100. Richard North Patterson, a former trial attorney, did much better, but I still found a point or two dubious. Not so Turow, who was completely convincing in this depiction of the workings of a criminal case and the office and citywide politics involved.

Given all that, I thought about half way in that unless I found the ending disappointing, this might be a five star book. Not that I'd say this ever compared with To Kill a Mocking Bird--or even The Maltese Falcon--but compared to Grisham or Patterson I was thinking this top-notch for a legal thriller. And, if anything, the pacing picked up after the middle. The trial scenes are so well done.

But with this one it's points off for the dismount. I did find the ending disappointing and dissatisfying. Both too contrived and too cynical for my tastes. I also in the end felt a bit of distaste for how the female characters were handled. I wouldn't call it misogynistic exactly--any more than I'd call the book racist as some have. Just because there are negative characters that happen to be minority doesn't make a book racist. Neither does a book with less than admirable female characters mean that it's sexist. To be honest, I'm not sure there are any characters in the book of any ethnicity or gender I'd call all that likable or admirable. Yet something especially in the depiction of Carolyn Polhemus, femme fatale, did leave me with a bad taste in my mouth and disinclined to read more of Turow. ...more

Like · see review