Innocent, by Scott Turow

Like Terry McMillan in Getting to Happy, Scott Turow returns to characters he first wrote about 20 years ago in Innocent--Rusty Sabich, his bipolar wife Barbara, their son Nat, and prosecutor Tommy Molto. When we last heard from these characters, Rusty had discovered that his wife had committed the murder he had been accused of and Molto had been disgraced for mishandling Rusty's trial.

As Innocent opens, we learn that Rusty, who is now an appeals judge, and Barbara, who is still crazy, remain married. Really? An attorney/judge stays with a woman who not only murdered his former girlfriend but framed him for the crime? It strains credulity, as does the fact that Rusty doesn't call anyone for 24 hours when he finds Barbara dead in their bed one morning. Even without a history with Rusty, we have suspicions...so why wouldn't Tommy Molto? (And I haven't even mentioned the unlikely scenario involving Nat falling in love with Rusty's former law clerk and lover, Anna.)

Turow writes courtroom scenes as well as anyone, and Rusty's second trial for murder--told mostly from Nat's perspective--makes good reading for a fan of legal thrillers. Overall, however, revisiting the story of a mentally ill but crafty wife and prosecutors with an ax to grind is hardly fresh.

Reading these two "sequels" in close succession causes me to wonder why authors decide to revisit characters after 20 years. While Turow and McMillan are not the most serious of authors, they aren't series authors who make a living leading the same cast of characters through a series of adventures. I expect more from them. Perhaps I was overly influenced by the TA in a freshman English class at the U of I back in 1969--"Don't ask what happens next," he used to say. "Nothing happens next. They're characters in a book. When the book is done, they cease to exist. Focus on what is in the book." Unless the second book has something important or at least interesting to say, reviving characters from a much earlier book actually seems, to me, to cheapen the first book.

Favorite passage: None