Scott Turow Books In Order

Kindle County Legal Thriller Books In Publication Order

  1. Presumed Innocent (1986)
  2. The Burden of Proof (1990)
  3. Pleading Guilty (1993)
  4. The Laws Of Our Fathers (1996)
  5. Personal Injuries (1999)
  6. Reversible Errors (2002)
  7. Limitations (2006)
  8. Innocent (2010)
  9. Identical (2013)
  10. Testimony (2017)
  11. The Last Trial (2020)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Ordinary Heroes (2005)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. One L (1977)
  2. Ultimate Punishment (2003)
  3. Surviving Justice (With: Dave Eggers) (2005)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Crown Crime Companion (1995)
  2. Guilty as Charged (1996)
  3. Great Writers and Kids Write Mystery Stories (1996)
  4. The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 (2006)
  5. Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All (2013)
  6. By the Book (2014)

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Scott Turow Books Overview

Presumed Innocent

Rusty Sabich is chief deputy prosecuting attorney in a large mid western city. His boss is in the midst of a bitter campaign for re election. A fellow prosecuting attorney, Carolyn Polhemus, has been brutally murdered. Rusty is handling the investigation and he needs results. Before election day. Before his illicit affair with Carolyn is uncovered. Election day brings a new prosecuting attorney into office. A political enemy who wants Rusty out. man whose own secret investigation has revealed Rusty’s relationship with Carolyn. A man who takes Rusty off the case and charges him with murder. Rusty now faces a long battle in court. Each side will twist the evidence to win its case, and try any procedural ploy, any courtroom trick that might ensure victory. Rusty’s ordeal will uncover corruption, deceit, depravity and incompetence and keep you spellbound. Who did kill Carolyn Polhemus?

The Burden of Proof

Presumed Innocent was the fiction debut of the decade a magnetic work of suspense that earned Turow acclaim for his unparalleled storytelling gifts. Now, in a brilliant follow up, Scott Turow stakes his claim as an American master, in a mesmerizing novel of law, family and deceit. Alejandro ‘Sandy’ Stern the brilliant defense lawyer from Presumed Innocent comes home to discover that his wife of 30 years has committed suicide, leaving behind a web of mystery, money and guilt. While Stern hunts for answers, he is caught up in the threatened Federal prosecution of his most powerful and troublesome client his own brother in law. Now, after a life of success, Sandy Stern is a man in desperate need of many truths about his family, his uncertain future and the troubled legacy his wife left behind.

Pleading Guilty

The star litigator from a top notch law firm has gone missing , along with 5.6 million dollars from a class action settlement, and ‘Mack’ Malloy, a foul mouthed ex cop and partner on the wane must find both. Immediately. Turow’s third novel takes us back to Kindle County, where skies are generally gray and the truth is seldom simple, in an edge of the chair story rife with indelible characters and riveting suspense.

The Laws Of Our Fathers

The Laws Of Our Fathers, Scott Turow’s most powerful novel to date, opens with a spectacular drive-by shooting in a notoriously drug-plagued Kindle County housing project. The victim is an aging white woman; within days her son, Nile Eddgar, a probation officer, is charged in connection with the crime.

Nile’s trial is presided over by Judge Sonia ‘Sonny’ Klonsky, whom Turow’s fans will remember from The Burden of Proof. It brings together a vivid cast of characters from Sonny’s student years during the turbulent sixties, among them Nile’s father, Loyell Eddgar, and Sonny’s old boyfriend Seth Weissman, now a renowned journalist. They are marked by their iconoelastic youth and carry secrets that will have explosive effects on the case at hand.

With its riveting suspense and indelibly drawn characters, The Laws Of Our Fathers shows once again why Scott Turow is not only the master of the modern legal thriller but also one of America’s most gifted and satisfying novelists.

Personal Injuries

A gripping, suspenseful, deeply satisfying new novel about corruption, deceit, and love. Robbie Feaver pronounced ‘favor’ is a charismatic personal injury lawyer with a high profile practice, a way with the ladies, and a beautiful wife whom he loves, who is dying of an irreversible illness. He also has a secret bank account where he occasionally deposits funds that make their way into the pockets of the judges who decide Robbie’s cases. Robbie is caught by the Feds, and, in exchange for leniency, agrees to ‘wear a wire’ as he continues to try to fix decisions. The FBI agent assigned to supervise him goes by the alias of Evon Miller. She is lonely, uncomfortable in her skin, and impervious to Robbie’s charms. And she carries secrets of her own. As the law tightens its net, Robbie’s and Evon’s stories converge thrillingly. Scott Turow takes us into, the world of greed and human failing he has made immortal in Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, and The Laws of Our Fathers, all published by FSG. He also shows us enduring love and quiet, unexpected heroism. Personal Injuries is Turow’s most reverberant, most moving novel a powerful drama of individuals trying to escape their characters.

Reversible Errors

A super charged, exquisitely suspenseful novel about a vicious triple murder and the man condemned to die for itRommy ‘Squirrel’ Gandolph is a Yellow Man, an inmate on death row for a 1991 triple murder in Kindle County. His slow progress toward certain execution is nearing completion when Arthur Raven, a corporate lawyer who is Rommy’s reluctant court appointed representative, receives word that another inmate may have new evidence that will exonerate Gandolph. Arthur’s opponent in the case is Muriel Wynn, Kindle County’s formidable chief deputy prosecuting attorney, who is considering a run for her boss’s job. Muriel and Larry Starczek, the original detective on the case, don’t want to see Rommy escape a fate they long ago determined he deserved, for a host of reasons. Further complicating the situation is the fact that Gillian Sullivan, the judge who originally found Rommy guilty, is only recently out of prison herself, having served time for taking bribes. Scott Turow’s compelling, multi dimensional characters take the reader into Kindle County’s parallel yet intersecting worlds of police and small time crooks, airline executives and sophisticated scammers and lawyers of all stripes. No other writer offers such a convincing true to life picture of how the law and life interact, or such a profound understanding of what is at stake personally, professionally, and morally when the state holds the power to end a man’s life.

Limitations

A Picador Paperback Original From the 1 New York Times bestselling author of Presumed Innocent comes a compelling new legal mystery featuring George Mason from Personal Injuries. Originally commissioned and published by The New York Times Magazine, this edition contains additional material. Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At fifty nine, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife’s recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e mails he has started to receive? And what is it about this horrific case of sexual assault, now on trial in his courtroom, that has led him to question his fitness to judge? In Limitations, Scott Turow, the master of the legal thriller, returns to Kindle County with a page turning entertainment that asks the biggest questions of all. Ingeniously, and with great economy of style, Turow probes the Limitations not only of the law but of human understanding itself.

Innocent

The eagerly anticipated sequel to the huge bestselling landmark legal thriller ‘Presumed Innocent‘. A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father. The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother. This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends. But it is the moment my mind returns to, the way I always see them…
In ‘Presumed Innocent‘, Rusty Sabich, family man and the number two prosecutor of Kindle County, was handed an explosive case the brutal murder of a woman who happened to be his former lover. A shocking turn of events suddenly transformed him from the accuser into the accused, and plunged him into a personal nightmare. Now 20 years have passed, and Rusty Sabich, 60 years old and the chief judge of an appellate court, sits on a bed where his dead wife Barbara lies. She has died under mysterious circumstances, and her death will once again pit Rusty against his old nemesis, Tommy Molto, the district attorney who tried to prosecute him for the murder of his lover all those years ago…

Ordinary Heroes

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he’d been told how David Dubin as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed had rescued Stewart’s mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father’s death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fianc e, and learns of his father’s court martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family’s secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who’d always refused to talk about his war.

As he pieces together his father’s past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton’s Third Army and desperate for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his commanders’. In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through carnage and chaos, the likes of which Dubin could never have imagined.

In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father’s character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.

From the Hardcover edition.

One L

One L, Scott Turow’s journal of his first year at law school introduces and a best seller when it was first published in 1977, has gone on to become a virtual bible for prospective law students. Not only does it introduce with remarkable clarity the ideas and issues that are the stuff of legal education; it brings alive the anxiety and competiveness with others and, even more, with oneself that set the tone in this crucible of character building. Turow’s multidimensional delving into his protagonists’ psyches and his marvelous gift for suspense prefigure the achievements of his celebrated first novel, Presumed Innocent, one of the best selling and most talked about books of 1987. Each September, a new crop of students enter Harvard Law School to begin an intense, often grueling, sometimes harrowing year of introduction to the law. Turow’s group of One Ls are fresh, bright, ambitious, and more than a little daunting. Even more impressive are the faculty: Perini, the dazzling, combative professor of contracts, who presents himself as the students’ antagonist in their struggle to master his subject; Zechman, the reserved professor of torts who seems so indecisive the students fear he cannot teach; and Nicky Morris, a young, appealing man who stressed the humanistic aspects of law. Will the One Ls survive? Will they excel? Will they make the Law Review, the outward and visible sign of success in this ultra conservative microcosm? With remarkable insight into both his fellows and himself, Turow leads us through the ups and downs, the small triumphs and tragedies of the year, in an absorbing and throught provoking narrative that teaches the reader not only about law school and the law but about the human beings who make them what they are. In the new afterword for this edition of One L, the author looks back on law school from the perspective of ten years’ work as a lawyer and offers some suggestions for reforming legal education.

Ultimate Punishment

America’s leading writer about the law takes a close, incisive look at one of society’s most vexing legal issues Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. In ‘real life,’ as a respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade, including successfully representing two different men convicted in death penalty prosecutions. In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan’s unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office. Along the way, he provides a brief history of America’s ambivalent relationship with the Ultimate Punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victims’ survivors, and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the Governor’s Mansion to Illinois’ state of the art ‘super max’ prison and the execution chamber. This gripping, clear sighted, necessary examination of the principles, the personalities, and the politics of a fundamental dilemma of our democracy has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow’s celebrated fiction.

Surviving Justice (With: Dave Eggers)

Beverly Monroe spent seven years in prison for murdering her companion of thirteen years; even though he had killed himself. Christopher Ochoa was persuaded to confess to a rape and murder he did not commit, and served twelve years of his life sentence before being freed by DNA evidence. Michael Evans and Paul Terry each served twenty seven years in prison for a rape and murder they did not commit. They were teenagers when they entered prison and middle aged when DNA proved their innocence. After spending years behind bars, hundreds of men and women with incontrovertible proof of their innocence have been released from America’s prisons. They were wrongfully convicted because of problems that plague many criminal proceedings inept defense lawyers, overzealous prosecutors, deceitful interrogation tactics, misidentifications, and more. Finally free, usually after more than a decade of incarceration, the wrongly condemned re enter society with nothing but scars from prison life only to struggle for survival on the outside. The thirteen men and women portrayed here, and the hundreds of others who have been exonerated, are the tip of the iceberg. By all estimates, there are thousands of innocent victims in prison today. Surviving Justice tells their unimaginable and inspiring stories.

The Crown Crime Companion

The Crown Crime CompanionThe Top 100 Mystery Novels Of All TimeSelected by theMystery Writers Of AmericaAnnotated by 0tto Penzler and Compiled by Mickey FriedmanFor The Crown Crime Companion, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a list of the best 100 mystery novels of all time, as well as a list of favorites in ten categories. Fully annotated and reviewed by Otto Penzler, this list of the top 100 mysteries will be a valuable resource to fans, introducing them to new novels and reminding them about books by favorite writers they may have missed. Each of the ten category lists is introduced by a master of that category:Classics:Suspense:Hardboiled/Private Eye:Police Procedural:Espionage/Thriller:Criminal:Cozy/Traditional:Historical:Humorous:Legal/Courtroom:H.R.F. KeatingMary Higgins ClarkSue GraftonJoseph WambaughJohn GardnerRichard CondonMargaret MaronPeter LoveseyGregory McdonaldScott Turow

Guilty as Charged

This anthology contains 15 crime and mystery stories by American writers such as Jay Brandon, Lia Matera, Susan Dunlap, John Lutz, Sarah Shankman, Maynard F. Thomson, Marcia Muller, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Carolyn Wheat, Stan Washburn, Valerie Frankel, Jeremia F. Healey III and Bill Pronzine.

Great Writers and Kids Write Mystery Stories

This anthology features 13 mystery stories written by well known mystery authors collaborating with their children and grandchildren. Each story features a short personal introduction by the adult and child writing team on what it was like to collaborate on their included story. Contributors include Scott Turow, Sharyn McCrumb, Stuart Kaminsky, Jonathan Kellerman, Elizabeth Engstrom, and many others.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

‘ Most of these stories are portraits, in styles ranging from sly to harrowing, of how crimes occurred…
If you like all your characters living at the end of a story, this may not be the book for you.’ from the introduction by Scott Turow

Best selling author Scott Turow takes the helm for the tenth edition of this annual, featuring twenty one of the past year’s most distinguished tales of mystery, crime, and suspense.

Elmore Leonard tells the tale of a young woman who’s fled home with a convicted bank robber. Walter Mosley describes an over the hill private detective and his new client, a woman named Karma. C. J. Box explores the fate of two Czech immigrants stranded by the side of the road in Yellowstone Park. Ed McBain begins his story on role playing with the line ”Why don’t we kill somebody?’ she suggested.’ Wendy Hornsby tells of a wild motorcycle chase through the canyons outside Las Vegas. Laura Lippman describes the ‘Crack Cocaine Diet.’ And James Lee Burke writes of a young boy who may have been a close friend of Bugsy Siegel.

As Scott Turow notes in his introduction, these stories are ‘about crime its commission, its aftermath, its anxieties, its effect on character.’ The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 is a powerful collection for all readers who enjoy fiction that deals with the extremes of human passion and its dark consequences.

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