{"id":11548,"date":"2025-08-18T07:56:39","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T11:56:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11548"},"modified":"2025-08-18T07:56:39","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T11:56:39","slug":"presumed-guilty-by-scott-turow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11548","title":{"rendered":"Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow"},"content":{"rendered":"
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No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty<\/a><\/em>, Scott Turow\u2019s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent<\/em> almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what his character, Rusty Sabich, is up to, now that he\u2019s in his 70s. And, I relish the clash of wits in a good courtroom drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the current book, Rusty\u2019s tenure as a judge in fictional Kindle County, Minnesota, is finished, and he\u2019s moved about a hundred miles north to rural\/small town Skageon County. He\u2019s living on a lake and has found a new live-in love, Bea Housley, a school principal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bea is not baggage-free. (Which of us is?) She has an irascible father and an adopted son, Aaron, in his early twenties who spent jail time for drug possession with intent to distribute (the drugs actually belonged to his on-and-off girlfriend, Mae Potter). Out on parole now, Aaron has to abide by certain rules: no driving, no associating with drug addicts, and no leaving the county. He\u2019s in Bea and Rusty\u2019s custody and living with them. Thankfully, he\u2019s pulling his life together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mae, the beautiful young woman Aaron\u2019s loved for years, remains a problem. He should not be associating with her, not only because it\u2019s a violation of his parole, but because she\u2019s unstable and manipulative. She\u2019s like a tornado through the lives of her friends and family. But young love is what it is. She and Aaron are secretly considering marriage, and he proposes a weekend camping trip to sort out their future once and for all. No phones, no distractions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trip ends with a big argument between them, during which Aaron realizes Mae will never change, that she will always be totally self-absorbed, that people\u2019s advice that she\u2019s not good for him is correct, that he\u2019s done. He hitchhikes home, just as Rusty and Bea were about to report his disappearance to his parole officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He makes it home. Mae does not. Two weeks later her decomposed body is found, apparently strangled. Aaron is devastated. Her family is too, and immediately points to Aaron as the probable culprit. That fact that he\u2019s Black and Mae was white hovers over him. Is this why they never approved of Mae and Aaron\u2019s relationship? Mae\u2019s father is the Prosecuting Attorney for Skageon County and puts a lot of law enforcement pressure on Aaron. Eventually, Aaron comes to trial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the book is the unfolding courtroom drama. I liked that part a lot. It was fascinating to see how the defense team tries to unravel the prosecutor\u2019s evidence, making what at first sounds devastating at least open to interpretation. If you enjoy courtroom scenes, you\u2019ll find some riveting ones here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But at 530 pages, the book has lots of other stuff packed in as well. There\u2019s too much backstory about Rusty, Bea, and their families and, for my taste, way too much navel-gazing by Rusty around various issues. I recognized that he loves Bea and didn\u2019t need it rehashed multiple times. He agonizes at great length about whether he should become Aaron\u2019s defense attorney, as Bea pleads with him to. He shouldn\u2019t, for obvious reasons, and you read all of them, many times. But of course he\u2019s going to do it, or else what\u2019s in those 530 pages? To complicate Rusty\u2019s emotional state further, he and Bea have a serious falling out over an issue I found frankly implausible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sum up, while the trial scenes were great, much of the rest of the story was, for me, seriously over-written. It\u2019s like eating three Christmas dinners in one evening. You\u2019re so stuffed it\u2019s hard to say you actually enjoyed the experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No doubt many crime fiction readers eagerly anticipated Presumed Guilty, Scott Turow\u2019s new legal thriller. I know I did, having been a fan ever since his debut with Presumed Innocent almost 40 years ago. I looked forward to seeing what … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,366,74,1567,126,359],"tags":[1145,1719],"class_list":["post-11548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-drama","category-emotions","category-lawyer","category-reading-2","category-review","tag-courtroom-drama","tag-scott-turow"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-30g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11550,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11548\/revisions\/11550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}