Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating all the way to the last page
Review: "Presumed Innocent" is a book that combines all of the aspects of a mystery novel with the aspects of a courtroom drama. At the start, Rusty Sabich is living a normal life. He has a fine job as a procuting attorney for Kindle County and is marred with one son. Suddenly, something completely unexpected happens. Mr. Sabbich has been accused of murduring a fellow P.A. The trial has begun and Rusty's attorneys are hard at work solving the mystery. It hits the defense team that there is some chance that Mr Sabich might have been framed by his co-workers. The mystery develops into an indepth trial filled with many twists and turns. Mr. Turow does a great job in keeping the reader guessing. At no point does Rusty Sabich give any indications as to whether he is innocent or guilty. Throughout the novel you will be asking yourself questions like was he set up? Did Rusty really kill her? Scott Turow provides a thrilling third person account of what a murder case would really be like. The ending will put you in a state of shock and haunt you even after you are finished reading
Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I have ever read
Review: I picked this book up after reading "1L" and I'm certainly glad I did. Turow's writing style is impeccable and a pleasure to read. There is no wasted space in this novel - everything written contributes directly to the end result of the novel. Turow really does an excellent job of respecting the intelligence of his audience. . .he doesn't ruin the story by stating the obivous and he really keeps you engaged. I enjoyed every page of this book and the end was a complete surprise to me, although it made complete sense. Don't read too many of these reviews because the some of the plot descriptions contain inadvertent spoilers! This is an excellent read.
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Summary: best bet on Turow
Review: Unlike 1L and Burden of Proof, two other books written by Turow, this book has it all. Adventure with a great twist in the end. For some who may read this, it might be considerd "justice." Just like fatal attraction, the affair never ends well.
Rating:
Summary: At the top of legal thriller chain
Review: One word - outstanding. This legal thriller will leave you spinning with surprise, even though all the clues have been carefully planted along the way. The plot has many turns, yet holds together nicely. It is simply one of the best and most imaginitive novels written.
Rating:
Summary: Classic
Review: There are a ton of reviews here describing the plot of the novel, so I'll just say this - anyone who likes mysteries, legal dramas, is interested in the law, has been in court, or just enjoys a good story needs to read this book. It is an absolute classic that launched this author's career. No one knows the courtroom like Turow.
Rating:
Summary: Great weekend read.
Review: This is one of those great mystery stories that seems to hint at a solution all along, but noticing the subleties dropped points to the real conclusion where a real charactore did the crime. I read the book and bought the movie within hours of finishing it. Good stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, with realistic characters
Review: Although I normally eschew this genre of fiction, I happened to see Turow on an interview show on CNBC, which struck me as odd. I listened to him as he gave his advice to aspiring writers ("just do it") and thought he sounded fairly articulate and not at all full of himself. On a whim I decided to pick up a couple of his novels and found out he's a pretty good writer. He has a feel for the human condition and can transmit it well; he seems also to grasp the ambiguity of most of our existence. The end of the book, where he tried to inject some question as to what actually happened, was a tiny bit weak, but his ending the novel without a typical "bad guy gets his in the end" wrap up more than made up for that.
Rating: 
Summary: Moves along well, somewhat disappointing ending
Review: I can't fault Scott Turow's writing style -- his narrative flows well, he keeps us interested until the end. I can't fault his faulty characters, either, or the pedantic explanations of legal procedures. I was, however, disappointed by the ending, which might have been a twist when this book first came out 15 years ago, but not now. Now, we've seen far too many episodes of Law & Order to ever be surprised by this kind of conclusion. We know the ins and outs of the courtroom, at least as they are portrayed in the media. We know what fibre analysis is, about fingerprints, alibis, etc. Turow explains these things to us throughout. Turows characters are weak as well. His blacks are either ghetto thugs or Uncle Toms who do their race justice. The black judge speaks in ebonics, his black punks talk like Tupac. He even uses the word "negro." His slimebags are short, fat, dumpy, Italians or other ethnics. The women are receptacles for male lust, or hollow housewives or grannies wearing round glasses. Hardly a sampling of American society. I did enjoy this book, however faulty its sociological representation of our culture. It's far better written than most thrillers that now line the bestseller shelves.
Rating:
Summary: Captivating
Review: I generally like Turow's books, so I was excited to begin reading this one. I wasn't disappointed. It held my interest from beginning to end, and the end is a doozy. Read it.
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Summary: The case of Kindle County vs. Rusty Sabich
Review: I still pick up my battered paperback copy of "Presumed Innocent" from time to time and reread my favorite scenes, which probably speaks to the worth of Scott Turow's novel as much as anything. But ultimately I think the strength of this novel is that it works well on both parts of the law & order equation, that is to say, both in the courtroom in terms of the legal drama as well as outside where the detective elements come into play. At heart "Presumed Innocent" is a basic horror story, about a man who may be convicted for a crime he did not do. However, the twist here is that we are not sure if we believe our narrator, Rusty Sabich, once the fair-haired chief deputy prosecutor in the Kindle County D.A.'s office. Rusty Sabich's boss, Raymond Horgan, is in a dogfight for the election with Nico Della Guardia, a former lieutenant. When one of their colleagues, Carolyn Polhemus, is found brutally murdered, Horgan gives Sabich the job. What Horgan does not know is that Sabich and Polhemus had been involved in an affair, which ended badly. Only Sabich's wife, Barbara, knows about the affair, and she has as much trouble dealing with her husband's obsession over the dead woman as she did with the affair. Sabich begins the investigation but there are no suspects, no leads, and no hope of finding the killer. But when Horgan loses the election, Sabich is stunned to find himself the new administrations one and only suspect for the Polhemus murder. The fact that Sabich was a prosecutor becomes a key part of the legal dilemma in which our narrator finds himself. On the one hand he can piece together the prosecution's case based, but on the other hand Sabich is well aware of how what he does in defending himself can add to his legal problems, especially since without proof of the affair the prosecution is lacking a motive to tie the circumstantial evidence together. This last bit is crucial to the novel's dynamic because we have our own reasonable doubt about Sabich's innocent. Even if we do not know that Agatha Christie had a first-person narrator be the murderer in one of her classic mystery novels, we have to entertain doubts about Sabich: his finger print is found on a glass in the apartment, there was a phone call from his house to Polhemus that night, etc. Sabich has reasonable explanations, but there are too many of them for us not to think that something is wrong here. Sabich, along with his friend Detective Lipranzer, is pursuing some ideas as to who would want to murder Polhemus and frame him for the crime. But in the courtroom it is defense attorney Sandy Stern who carries the legal burden of Sabich's defense; provided he can get his client to stop acting like an attorney during the trial. But then the presiding judge, Larren Lyttle, is perfectly willing to give Sabich every courtesy. Lyttle is a defendant's judge, who is most insistent that jurors in his courtroom presume the innocence of defendants. That is the good news. The bad news is that Sabich learns Lyttle might be deeply involved in his alternative theory of the case. In other words, the judge is a potential loose cannon. For me the strength of "Presumed Innocent" remains what happens in the courtroom. Stern's cross-examination of the coroner, "Painless" Kumagai is a wonderful set piece. It is the sort of scene that makes you realize how few novels set in courtroom ever manage to come up with really first-rate scenes. But what makes this novel so compelling is how well it keeps us guessing as to not only whether or not Sabich did the murder, but also whether or not he will be convicted of the crime. Even when one of those questions is resolved, the other remains unresolved until the final chapters of the book. Scott Turow has not written a novel as good as "Presumed Innocent," and it seems unlikely he ever will. This is not because of his lack of talent (certainly he has not flooded the market with his novels unlike Grisham), but simply because he may have committed the unpardonable sin of writing his greatest book first (as Richard Adams did with "Watership Down"). I could live with such a curse.
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