Outlawyer — Turow’s Thriller Delivers The Goods

'Pleading Guilty'

by Scott Turow

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24

Like a diabolical roller coaster, Scott Turow's "Pleading Guilty" grabs your attention from the beginning, leads you through unimaginably complex intrigue, and leaves you dazzled at the end - but just about where you thought you started. Turow, who dominated bestseller lists with the smashing "Presumed Innocent" and the less spectacular, but more complex, "Burden of Proof," combines the best of both earlier books in this new legal mystery.

It begins simply enough: Bert Kamin, an eccentric partner in a large law firm, suddenly disappears, apparently with nearly $6 million from an escrow account for one of the firm's clients, Trans-National Air, to pay off plaintiffs in an airplane-crash settlement. The income-fixated firm, Gage & Griswell, is panic-stricken at the thought of disclosing the loss to the airline, its major institutional client.

It directs McCormack A. ("Mack") Malloy, a former cop who is a partner in the firm, to locate Bert and recover the money. As you might expect, things go from bad to worse as Malloy begins to probe. --

The novel takes the form of Malloy's memorandum to Gage & Griswell's management committee, reporting on the results of his investigation. The device is clever, allowing Turow to manipulate the narration between past and present and to follow Malloy's investigation and deductive process.

But at times it also is tiresome. Malloy is a troubled alcoholic, divorced from his lesbian spouse, father of a rebellious son, deeply sarcastic and depressed. Although clearly the central character, he is developed in excruciating - almost pointless - detail at the expense of other major characters, who remain something of empty shells, moving through their roles without shedding illumination on their actions or motives.

Yet the tortuous complexity for which Turow is famous carries the novel past these problems. Malloy uncovers, participates in, or is threatened by murder, perjury, grand larceny, breaking and entering, postal theft, tax evasion, gambling, intra-firm back-stabbing, and a wide variety of ethical lapses. There are at least five separate conspiracies or covert trysts, each involving overlapping sets of characters.

Bert, it turns out, may have vanished with his gay lover, enmeshed in an apparently unrelated basketball-fixing scheme and on the run from the mob, which, as it turn out, is the least of the problems. His lover is the son of the fiercely independent accountant for the firm - herself secretly involved with one of the senior partners.

Looking for clues, Malloy breaks into Bert's apartment and discovers - what else? - a body in the refrigerator. But it's not Bert. All of this pales beside the real drama as Malloy discovers where the money went (an off-shore bank) and who sent it there (you'll find out when you read the book).

Turow devotes particular care to exploring the relationship between big corporations, their general counsel's office, and their large outside law firms. The political in-fighting, law-firm obsequiousness, and divided loyalties are developed with careful precision, with Gage & Griswell's managers dancing gingerly between self-protection and outright deception when it becomes apparent that one or more of Trans-National's officers may be something less than a victim.

But the boundaries between the victim, the criminal, and what is fair and right constantly shift and blur. White-collar crime in a morally ambiguous context can make ethical judgment difficult - a point close to the heart of Turow's novel. The troubled Malloy quickly becomes more than a mere investigator and when hetakes control, the suspense is in seeing which way he will turn.

As in "Burden of Proof," Turow manipulates the various relationships: between lawyers, clients, lovers, old friends, even bitter enemies. He delights in twisting each, testing loyalties and revealing weakness and betrayal. --

But the closing pages are what make this a great piece of popular fiction. Like "Presumed Innocent," the obscure, seemingly disparate strands of plot suddenly converge, and the title takes on an ironic, not apparent meaning.

"Pleading Guilty" is the best sort of potboiler: It presents a plot that is complex and compelling on the surface, yet leaves the reader with deeper, more troubling questions to ponder.

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