What is Presumed Innocent about?

Rusty Sabich is the chief deputy prosecutor in a fictional Midwestern city, a competent, serious man trusted by his boss and respected by his colleagues. Then his colleague and ex-lover, Carolyn Polhemus, is found murdered. Because Rusty investigated the case briefly before recusing himself, and because his boss has reasons to destroy him, Rusty is charged with the murder. The novel is told entirely in his voice, from the position of a man who knows how the system works and is watching it turn on him.

Turow is a practicing attorney who wrote Presumed Innocent while commuting by train to his Chicago law firm, and the novel has the procedural texture of someone who actually knows what a murder trial looks like from the inside. The courtroom scenes are precise — cross-examinations that reveal and conceal simultaneously, evidentiary rulings that matter, witnesses who lie in ways that prosecutors know about and can't use. But the legal accuracy is in service of something more interesting: a study of the gap between what courts determine and what actually happened.

The novel was the template for a generation of legal thrillers, including much of what Grisham wrote afterward, and it surpasses most of them in psychological depth. Rusty is not simply a wrongly accused man — he is a man who has done things he is not proud of, who is attached to a woman who did not love him, and whose guilt in the moral sense is separate from his guilt in the legal sense. The ambiguity the novel maintains about what actually happened is not a gimmick; it is the point.

The twist ending is one of the most discussed in legal fiction and has divided readers since the book's publication. Some find it devastating; others find it manipulative. Both responses are defensible. What is not in dispute is that Turow is the most technically proficient writer the legal thriller genre has produced, and that this first novel remains his masterwork. Read it for the trial, stay for the final pages.