Innocent

I don't remember when I read "Presumed Innocent" (Kindle County Legal Thriller #1) by Scott Turow but it must have been prior to 2012 as it is not listed on my GoodReads listing but if you've read that book you will understand the comment that you'll never forget it. "Legal thriller" seems too trite as a descriptive tag as Scott Turow's writing is in a class by itself.

"Innocent" (Kindle County Legal Thriller #8) is beyond amazing. It could be a stand-alone novel but my feeling is that if you miss reading "Presumed Innocent" first, you will truly be missing an extraordinary writer's talent who excels at his craft of writing and weaving intricacies from the past (#1) and weaving intricacies anew.

A legal thriller re-visiting the lives of the characters of Presumed Innocent 20 years later, this is an enjoyable enough, well-written sequel.

I would definitely recommend reading the two in sequence--certain crucial events in Presumed Innocent which are central to the plot of Innocent are only obliquely referenced. The protagonist, Rusty Sabich, is basically having another "mid-life crisis" to much the same effect as in the first novel. In Presumed Innocent, the story successfully evoked the moral complexities of loyalties owed to children and spouses; in Innocent, the weight of the characters' past tends to overshadow the ambiguities which distinguished the first book. (I don't want to spoil the story, but it is a difficult task to re-visit the villain(s ) 20 years later--how sympathetic can the author and reader be expected to be to them?)

The opening chapters alternate between the "present " and events which took place 16 months in the past, an approach which can work well in film but which I found choppy and irritating here (eventually the time lines converge into a single narrative).

Despite these complaints, I read Innocent in just a few sittings--it was a fun if not completely fulfilling page turner.

This book starts slow...lots of build-up. The trial description is interesting and somewhat suspenseful and the narration, which jumps between the POV of the three main characters keeps the reader entertained. However, the outcome is utterly predictable.A good read, but not on par with Presumed Innocent.

My book club read Presumed Innocent and decided to read this sequel. I labored with this book. First, I totally dislike the main character, Rusty Sabich. In this novel, Rusty is a judge and has just turned 60 years old. This begins another downward spin for Rusty. He becomes involved with a woman 20 years younger than himself and then his wife dies under mysterious circumstances. Rusty is accused of the murder, by poison, of his wife. The majority of the book deals with Rusty's affair with Anna. Anna jumps from bed to bed, but decides in the closing of the novel that she has finally found true love. The story plays like a bad soap opera. Rusty undergoes a second trial for murder of a woman, and the outcome is predictable.

The first half was tired, boring and full of cliches. The second half, timed with court action is much better. Good idea for sequel after 20 years though.

A good page-turner, his best since Presumed Innocent.

Kept my attention to the very end. Light enough without being too light.

Innocent by Scott Turow is a continuation of the story of Rusty Sabich. It is twenty years after the events of Presumed Innocent, and Rusty Sabich is once again the target of a murder investigation. While I am not normally a fan of courtroom drama, this work is very well done. Well worth the time spent reading it, it is a solid four star book.

Just as John Le Carre's novels are multi-dimensional fiction that happen to include espionage, Scott Turow's novels are character studies that happen to frequently be set in the criminal justice system. This sequel to Presumed Innocent is not as gripping, but it burrows deeper into your soul. What provokes a man to risk everything for a woman half his age? How do a father and son create a loving and meaningful relationship? How corrosive is anger to a psychotic wife? What of professional jealousy, and of morality and ambition. All of these elements are present in this memorable work. My only quibble is the pacing; there's a back and forth element in terms of past and present which I found interfered with the thrust of the narrative. Yet, for all that, the conclusion is masterful: rich, provocative, complex, upsetting, resolving.

Audiobook........I think the reason that I liked this story so much is that I liked the movie, "Presumed Innocent" , and kept picturing Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, and Raul Julia in the roles, and I also knew the back story. It is a good courtroom drama and I would enjoy seeing the movie. Where is the limit to protecting those we love?

Tense and exciting rematch between Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto, 20 years after the events of Turow's PRESUMED INNOCENT (which, cleverly, were not detailed in this story). Nor was the surprise ending of this book given away ahead of time, yet upon hearing it, I knew it fit all the facts. A well-written, fast-paced story expertly narrated by Edward Hermann and Orlagh Cassidy.

This book was interesting but a little too long and seemed repetitious in parts because of the 4 main characters telling the story. The ending wasn't a surprise and the main character Rusty Sabich really isn't likeable and difficult to feel any sympathy for him. His son Nate is the interesting character as he tries to understand what is going on with his father and build a relationship with Anna.

I read Presumed Innocent when it was first released many years ago, and knew that this book was a sequel of sorts, focusing once again on then-prosecutor and now-judge Rusty Sabich. I will confess to doing a quick fact check on Wikipedia, because while I remembered that Presumed Innocent ended with an explosive twist, I couldn't quite remember what it was! (This is much more a commentary on my lousy memory than on Turow's writing.) But once I refreshed my memory on the essential points, I dove into Innocent and managed to consume it in relatively short time.Turow creates memorable characters, but where he really shines is the legal back and forth, both inside and outside the courtroom. Innocent alternates viewpoint between Rusty, his son Nat, his former law clerk Anna, and Tommy Molto, the current prosecuting attorney who has a long personal and professional history with Rusty. Like the first book, this one also revolves around a startling twist, not quite as jaw-dropping but one that passes the test of making sense even after you've finished the book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and look forward to reading more from Turow.

Does it seem a long time ago that Presumed Innocent (the hit novel and smash movie) transformed author Scott Turow into a household name? If so, there is a good reason for that; it was a long time ago. The novel was first published in December 1987 and the movie version starring Harrison Ford was released in 1990. Now, let’s call it 22 years later, Turow is back with a sequel that tells what Rusty Sabich has been up to since he was acquitted on murder charges all those years ago.When last seen, Rusty Sabich had just been acquitted of the murder of his mistress, a fellow attorney, and had made the decision, for the sake of his young son, to try to keep his marriage intact. The evidence against Sabich was strong, almost overwhelming, but he was acquitted, in part because Prosecutor Tommy Molto was humiliated into admitting that his office had mishandled some of the physical evidence against Sabich. It has happened again. Another woman close to Rusty Sabich is dead, and he is suspected by Tommy Molto of having caused her death. Barbara, Sabich’s wife of 36 years, is found dead in her bed but Sabich does not bother to report her death to anyone, including her son, for some 24 hours. Barbara’s death is at first attributed to natural causes, odd though Sabich’s behavior may have been. Molto’s chief deputy, however, is not so sure about the cause of death, and piece by little piece, he methodically builds a case against Sabich that will end with Sabich and his old adversary, Tommy Molto, locked in a rematch. On the surface, it does not look good for Rusty Sabich – and that is his own fault. There is evidence of a recent affair that he refuses to discuss, his marriage has been shaky for years, and it becomes obvious that he has been seeking a way out of it. Turow uses alternating first-person narratives to tell the story with some chapters told through the eyes of Rusty, some through the eyes of Tommy, and others through the eyes of Nat (Rusty’s son) or Anna (Rusty’s recent lover). As in the first novel, Turow shows the good and bad sides of all the main characters, allowing the reader to judge the rightness or wrongness of what each of them does. The trial itself is a cliffhanger that offers the reader several opportunities to change his mind about Sabich’s guilt or innocence, and who committed the crime (if there was one) if Sabich is innocent.The audio version of the book is read by Edward Herrmann and Orlagh Casssidy (who handles mostly the chapters narrated by the Anna Vostic character). Herrmann does a particularly fine job with all the male characters but I had a difficult time matching Cassidy’s voice to my mental image of the youngish mistress, Anna Vostic. That distraction was a minor issue, however, and I found that using separate readers based on the sex of the character narrating each chapter was a great help in keeping all the details straight.Innocent will likely appeal most to those who have fond memories of Presumed Innocent, but potential readers should not be concerned if they are unfamiliar with that book. Turow brings enough information from the first book into this one, by having the prosecutors rehash the first case in preparation of the new one, that Innocent works very well as a standalone novel.That one or two of the novel’s plot elements do not seem quite logical to me, causes me to rate this one at a 4.5 rather than at 5.0, but I did thoroughly enjoy it over the number of days I listened to it on my daily commute.Rated at: 4.5

We readers are all the same: if a book does not respond to our expectations, we think it is a bad book. So people who want a thriller with a Tom Cruise hero and a lot of action give this book one star. It is not that kind of a book. What I found interesting is that the suspense comes from the characters, not from the action. There are 6 to 8 characters, none of them has an easy life, none of them has been very happy, none of them has a clear direction in life because, let us face it, life is a mess. OK. You do not want to read a story where people have a standard morality (pretty low nowadays) and not much guts (pretty common nowadays)? Do not read this: it is not a usual thriller, and you will be disappointed. I come from the opposite side: I was just getting tired of the machismo of Patterson Kill Alex Cross, the semi-permanent lack of compassion of Jonathan Kellerman (Mystery) and the brutality of Sandford (Bad Blood). I love these authors, but I wanted a break: this is it.There is a judge who thinks that he does the right thing by staying with a wife with severe mental problems. Maybe it is not the right thing or maybe he does not live to his own expectations of good behavior. Nobody will prevent him to get a mistress and bid for the supreme court. There is his wife who promises to take all of her medications, but she still has these incredible rages, and she feels lonely and neglected. There is an assistant who thinks that an overactive sex life is the best way to find a husband. The wife dies in bizarre circumstances, and it is up to you reader to guess what happened through the confessions of the various parties and very little and confusing evidence. I enjoyed it, and it seems that the author keeps a compassionate look on his creatures. Maybe it is why so many people do not like the book: maybe compassion does not belong to thrillers. That would be too bad, if it were true.

A lot of years ago, I read Scott Turow's PRESUMED INNOCENT and loved it.The scene near the end of the book when we find out what really happened completely surprised me. I was so impressed with Mr. Turow's talent, and was delighted to find his next one, THE BURDEN OF PROOF -- which I hated. I decided that the author had one good book in him and I had already read it. I didn't even glance at the books that bore his name until this past week when book titled INNOCENT caught my eye in our public library. I saw Turow's name, but decided I could at least read the inside front of the cover to see what the book is about. It's about the same people that were in the book that I loved, and this one is every bit as good as the original. So much so, that I hated to see it end. Go find INNOCENT by Scott Turow (2010). If you haven't read the original, read it first and that way you'll have double the pleasure.

Stopped reading - I realized I really don't like any of his characters and have better things to do - moving on

Background: Presumed Innocent, written twenty-three years ago, begins with the death of Carolyn Polhemus, a deputy Prosecuting Attorney (P.A.) who worked in the office of Raymond Horgan (Chief P.A.) and Rusty Sabich (Chief Deputy P.A.). Sabich, age 39, had been having an affair with Carolyn, but it had ended six months earlier. Rusty had worked on a case with Carolyn, who was blonde, built, bold, and sexy, and he fell hard for her. With her dynamism and aggressive personality, she was the opposite of Rusty’s moody, taciturn wife Barbara, his main tie to whom was their 8-year-old son Nat. To everyone’s surprise, Rusty is accused of the murder. He is prosecuted by two colleagues, Nico Della Guardia and Tommy Molto. The judge, Larren Lyttle, is an old colleague of Rusty’s boss. When the jury is called, Judge Lyttle, who has always favored the defense, explains to them: "Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you again what you are to presume. Mr. Sabich is innocent. I am the judge. I am tellin you that. Presume he is innocent. When you sit there, I want you to look over and say to yourself, There sits an innocent man.” Rusty’s lawyer, Sandy Stern, conducts a brilliant defense, and the trial is dismissed. But by now you know that has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, which is yet to be determined.”Innocent: Innocent takes place twenty years after the events of Presumed Innocent. Rusty Sabich has just turned sixty, and now serves as Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals. He is a candidate for the State Supreme Court. His son Nat is now 28 and in law school, and his wife of 36 years, Barbara, has just died.Tommy Molto, now Acting P.A., is egged on to investigate by his brash, hot-headed Chief Deputy, Jim Brand. Brand has discovered that Rusty is having an affair [again!] and thinks that provides a motive for killing his wife. The young woman Rusty is seeing is his senior law clerk. Anna Vostic, only 34, is blonde, smart, and sexy (hmmm, sound familiar?) and Rusty’s life has been in a holding pattern for twenty years now. He doesn’t feel like he has been “living.” In spite of his professional success, he is without “the unnameable piece of happiness that has eluded me for sixty years” that I think we can understand as a fulfilling personal relationship. His wife is bipolar and on a plethora of antidepressants and sleeping pills. They have little interaction, except with respect to Nat.In spite of the pleasure Anna provides, Rusty feels like an idiot for having an affair with her, and decides to end it:“I know at all moments that what I am doing is in every colloquial sense insane," Rusty says. "Powerful middle-aged man, beautiful younger woman. The plot scores zero for originality and is deservedly the object of universal scorn, including my own. . . . I don't need someone else's advice to know this is simply crazy, hedonistic, nihilistic, and that most important 'istic' -- unreal. It must end.”But Molto and Brand know only that Rusty waited 24 hours after his wife died before calling the police, and that Barbara had an overdose of antidepressants in her body. No fingerprints are on the pill bottle but Rusty’s. And so they go to trial. Once again, Rusty calls on Sandy Stern to help exonerate him. But he can’t get lucky twice, can he? Besides, isn’t “innocence” relative? Discussion: I loved Presumed Innocence for the superb courtroom exchanges and the onion-like unfolding of revelations with the reader never knowing where the truth lay until the end.Innocent is still good but on the whole I think less good than its predecessor. It felt as if there were a little less testosterone running through not only the characters but the narration. These weren’t energetic velociraptors at the top of their game. The perspective of a judge is perforce calmer and more judicious, if you will, than that of hotshot prosecutors, and there was less palpable excitement in the story. Nevertheless, the books both have a very masculine feel to them. They aren’t mysteries in the sense of “thrillers” but you couldn’t call them “cozy” either. And in fact, no one has tea and biscuits, not once. This is Chicago, after all (thinly disguised as “Kindle”); meatball sandwiches are more the norm.Ultimately, Innocent was sad for me. The characters who were in the prime of their lives in Presumed Innocent are now on the back stretches. Their stories are pretty much over. They spend their time looking back on missed chances, old hurts, former pleasures, and even new sources of happiness, but these are the comparatively less passionate joys of older age. Contentment is what they seek; not an adrenalin rush.Yet Turow’s skills as a suspense writer have not suffered any diminution. He keeps you guessing until the end, and his smooth writing style and intelligent plot developments are more than satisfactory.

When Rusty Sabich, now over sixty years old and the chief judge of the appellate court, finds his wife Barbara, dead under mysterious circumstances, Tommy Molto assuses him of murder for the second time, setting into motion a trail that is vintage Turow-the courtroom at its most taut and explosive.

I am SO glad I listened to Presumed Innocent and followed it immediately with Innocent. What a fascinating and gigantic mess to work through in the second installment! It was fascinating to read a sequel that showed "what happened later." In some ways there could still be a third book, following up on Anne.

Turow takes Presumed Innocent readers back to Kindle County with many of the original players in a family/courtroom drama that should please most fans. Rusty Sabich, now 60-ish, is back, as a judge, having been found innocent of a murder charge decades earlier. His wife has died of natural causes (or not), and there the narrative begins.It definitely isn't necessary to have read Presumed, but some of the back story is fun to know when speculating about what is going on behind the scenes (to be revealed only at the very end). The pacing is a bit slow at times and the detail plentiful, but for me, that made it more, not less enjoyable. The multi-dimensional characters are well wrought and the dialogue convincing. Definitely worth a read.

Another great read from Scott Turow! This is the sequel, after twenty years, to Presumed Innocent. Rusty Sabich finds his wife Barbara dead under mysterious circumstances. Once again, Tommy Molto accuses him of murder. It's a great story , complex, well written and a page turner.I think you will enjoy it more if you are familiar with Presumed Innocent, so start there if you haven't already.

I have read a few Scott Turow books, including Presumed Innocent, and I generally like him. Having read a lot of "literature" lately, I was looking for a page turner. As a general rule it is hard for me to give books like this a high rating. They almost need a different scoring scale. Be that as it may, for what it is, it kept me entertained. I had trouble with the flaws of the characters(Rusty and Anna). I always find Turow's legal background a plus in looking at the details of the plot. All in all, if this is the type of book that you like, then you usually can't go wrong with a Scott Turow novel.

I must have really liked this book because, while I was reading it, I mentioned my enjoyment of it to my wife and suggested she read it. I also started thinking about "who did it" as the story unfolded. I'm usually just "along for the ride".I liked that the chapters were written from the view of four different characters and flipped back and forth in time. The courtroom scenes and background legal manuevering were absorbing.Finally, I was wrong about "who did it" primarily because, at least in my opinion, there wasn't really a single guilty party.

The beauty of Presumed Innocent for me wasn't so much in the unexpected denouement (although that was wonderful), but rather in Turow's ability to make me read page after page about characters I didn't really like. Rusty Sabitch and his philandering ways just doesn't rank high on my list of literary characters I feel sorry for - he so patently got himself into a bad situation and yet still rises above it, the ever-golden boy riding the flames to success. The best character in Presumed Innocent is Sandy Stern in all his cutthroat elegance. Still I read it and enjoyed it and have read everything Turow has written since and have enjoyed them, too, so I was excited to read the latest, Innocent, a many years later sequel to the book that made Turow's career.In the new book everyone has aged and moved along in their careers. Rusty is turning 60, a judge, still married to Barbara. Their son, Nat, is finishing law school and Tommy Molto is Acting Prosecuting Attorney, but married now with a new baby. Time has touched everyone, the author included, except perhaps for Rusty Sabitch who still seems to stroll through his life receiving accolades as his due. The tragedy of Rusty is, of course, that his impulses have led him to a life of surface achievement and deep unhappiness in the places it matters - love and family connections. Reaching out one more time for love in all the wrong places, Rusty sets into motion a chain of events that will haunt his family forever, much as the ghost of the first book haunts every page of this one.This is not an edge-of-your-seat page turner. It's more a measured consideration of the choices people make and make again, even when they know the results will be deadly. Turow elegantly captures the intricate melancholy of regret, of second guessing, of coming to the end of the line. He is always thoughtful, always engaging, always worth the time.

This is a sequel to Presumed Innocent by Turow and a worse work. Innocent is a depressing, morbid tale of pain, uncertainty, betrayal, confusion, failure and surrender. The characters are indeed well developed and the book would probably work better as a movie than it came off as a novel. The protagonist, so active in the first work, is muted, confused and Turow's insistence on maintaining a level of doubt and mystery for the reader about the past is perhaps necessary but makes the protagonist's musings and thoughts fall flat as in reality the allusions and memories of his previous legal troubles would clearly be more explicit. While most thrillers benefit from crafting suspense by jolting the reader across a timeline rather than moving linearly, Turow switches both across time and across narrators, and in a story with so much complexity this makes the flow halting and hurts the book. The actual content is perhaps too realistic and includes so much pain that it's almost impossible to read the book as a thriller vs. a relationship/family/struggle/betrayal book. Skip it.

Well plotted legal thriller, with Turrow's ability to give great depth to his characters.

A good thriller up to Scott Turow's standards. Some of the plot twists are a bit contrived and the complicated romances are a bit much. What I don't understand is why Rusty, when coming clean to Nat, did not reveal the ending of "Presumed Innocent".

I was thrilled to receive a copy of Innocent from ER here and immediately went on a month-long, fruitless search for Presumed Innocent so that I could be ready for this one. Can't find it. I remember enough, however, to recognize the main characters from *PI* 20-some years later: Rusty Sabich, acquitted of the murder of his lover in *PI*, now an appeals court judge; Barbara, his bipolar wife; Nat, his now-grown son, recently graduated from law school; Tommy Molto, now PA for Kindle County, who prosecuted his first murder trial; Sandy Stern, Rusty's defense attorney. With a couple of additional characters, these make up the cast.Rusty is running for superior court judge when he wakes up one morning to find Barbara has died in the night. Molto and his favorite assistant PA soon bring another charge of murder against Rusty. The plot twists again and again as they come to trial. There's a thin line between plots that are well-crafted and plots that are contrived, and I can't quite determine on which side this one comes down. I think that lovers of courtroom drama should be well pleased with this one.This is also a story of family relationships - especially the relationship between fathers and sons. It is a story as well of betrayal and of what we will and will not sacrifice of ourselves.

I love anything by Scott Turow and getting to review the sequel to his masterpeice Presumed Innocent was a real treat. All the main characters from the first book were back only about twenty years older and in some cases wiser. Tommy Molto was the biggest surprise. I really liked the guy this time. Rusty is now a Chief Judge of the State Court of Appeals and just as conflicted about his life as ever. His relationship with Barbara seems even stranger what with the fact they stayed married all those years. That was a window into that dysfuntional little world. It was a great story with plenty of twists and turns. I really enjoyed this one.