Book #88: Presumed Innocent

Title: Presumed Innocent
Author: Scott Turow

Eddie read Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent at what must have been a formative time in his life, because more than 20 years later, he still remembers details of the story that are hazy for me a week after finishing the audiobook. There are some definite gaps in my cultural literacy, and until I ordered both Presumed Innocent and the long-awaited sequel Innocent for my iPod a few weeks ago, this was one of the glaring holes. If you, like me, were a preteenager when the book was originally released, then you may not know that Presumed Innocent details the story of prosecuting attorney Rusty Sabich, is put on trial by his former colleagues for the death of a former colleague. Did Sabich kill Carolyn Polhemus, an attorney in the office with whom he, and several other guys at work, were sleeping? Is the case a vendetta for political and personal reasons, or is there reasonable doubt? Most importantly, did Rusty do it?

I really enjoyed listening to Presumed Innocent. The narrator, Edward Herrmann, read the story well without being annoying or doing weird things with his voice. The story is also suspenseful and intelligent, but relatively easy to follow. If I had to stop for a second to help a kid or say hi to a neighbor while I was out running, it wasn't too hard for me to pick up the story. I'd compare it to a smart John Grisham story of the early days, but I guess that it predated those good early Grishams (weirdly enough). The only thing that sticks out a week later that bugged me about the story is that it was set in the fictional Kindle County. It's fairly obvious even to the uninitiated that Kindle County is Chicago, but I don't understand exactly why he didn't just set the book in Chicago. I breezed through the 16 hours of the story in a few days, and immediately plunged into Innocent, so that testifies to its readability and the strength of the story.