What a great read! Mr. Turow really knows how to keep one on the edge of their seat. Probably the best legal thriller writer there is. ( )

A delightful read! Full of many well drawn characters, all flawed in one way or another and mashing together to forcefully lead the reader deeper and deeper into the plot. We learn much, more than enough to solve the mystery and yet the author throws up a veil that keeps us from seeing the whole story. Long term relationships stress the characters and the reader. Each twist gives new hope while dashing the old. Rusty Sabich is punished but the the truly guilty are never prosecuted.

It has been a while since I read this book. But the lasting impression it left me with was that the author had a problem with women. It seemed that every woman in the story was deeply flawed if not crazy/evil. Even the one disabled prosecutor who seemed to be overly venerated was in a wheel chair due to her driving drunk and killing her husband in a car accident. As I said it has been a long time and I may not be remembering fairly, but did anyone else come away with this feeling? ( )

Legal, detective ( )

This was really a very good novel, once I started into it. It has a narrative structure that I am often impatient with, since the narrator is the person who is the one suffering outrageous fortune, but the descriptions of the trial and the denoument were very gripping, enough to keep me up until 1130 PM on a work night to finish it. The protagonist, Rusty Sabich, is a deputy prosecuting attorney during a reelection campaign of the prosecuting attorney. He has had an affair with another prosecutor, and she ends up dead. He is eventually accused and brought to trial for her murder, and is acquitted because his lawyer manages to convince the judge that he was set up by the newly elected prosecuting attorney. Excellent characters, very vivid and believable details of the trials and Chicagostyle politics. ( )