Thirty-five years after we first met Rusty Sabich in Scott Turow’s bestseller Presumed Innocent (made into a movie starring Harrison Ford), we meet Rusty again in Turow’s new legal thriller Presumed Guilty.
In Presumed Innocent, Rusty, a senior prosecuting attorney in Kindle County, was accused of a murder he did not commit. After the crushing experience of a highly publicized trial, Rusty was acquitted with the help of his brilliant defense attorney Sandy Stein. After the trial, however, Rusty discovered a horrifying secret that would forever change his life.
Rusty is now a semi-retired counselor comfortably settled in a small town of Como Stop, an upscale community where affluent denizens of the big Midwestern cities spend glorious summers in their stately lakeside vacation homes. From time-to-time Rusty takes on legal mediation cases that leave him enough time to enjoy life at his lakeside home and to “babysit” his granddaughters.
Several years earlier Rusty met Bea, a local high school principal. Although Bea is almost twenty years younger than Rusty, they enjoy being together and have a deeply satisfying intimate relationship. Rusty wants to spend the rest of his life with Bea, and she finally agrees to marry him.
Years ago, after desperately trying to have a child with her first husband Lloyd, Bea adopted a newborn baby boy Aaron, who is now twenty-two years old. When Aaron and his longtime girlfriend Mae announce their plans to get married, neither Aaron’s nor Mae’s parents are happy about it. Aaron is still on probation after serving two years for drug possession. A talented artist, Aaron has been “clean” for a year and is thinking about going to an art school. Mae comes from a leading Como family. Her father, a scion of several generations of attorneys, is a county DA currently running for reelection. He is vehemently against the marriage, not in a least degree because Aaron is black.
When Bea adopted Aaron, she never considered potential consequences of raising a black child in a predominantly white community. While Aaron was always loved by his parents and rarely bullied in school because of his skin color, he always felt different from other kids, and he was never a “part of the crowd.” The only exception was Mae, a vivacious, beautiful blonde, who took Aaron under her wing starting in kindergarten. They still feel connected to each other, even though Mae continues using drugs.
Two days after Aaron and Mae go on a camping trip in a nearby nature preserve, ostensibly to have a “serious talk” about their union, Aaron comes back alone. He is angry because even though they agreed not to use phones or drugs, Mae kept taking pills and snapped endless selfies, suddenly deciding to become a Tik Tok “influencer.” After a heated argument Aaron leaves Mae at the camping site and hitchhikes back home.
A week later, when Mae does not return home, Aaron still thinks she wanted to worry everyone before staging a “comeback.” Two weeks later, Mae’s car is found in the woods hours away from the camping site. Mae’s body, badly decomposed, is in the car, and Aaron is arrested for murder.
After an unsuccessful search for a defense attorney, Bea begs Rusty to defend Aaron. Although he loves his future stepson, Rusty hesitates to take on the task because he realizes that, regardless of whether he would succeed or fail in defending Aaron, his relationship with Bea and a hope of living out his remaining years with her, will never be the same.
Turow’s masterly narrative leads readers through intricacies of the plot and takes time to define the key characters and examine complex interrelationships between them. The narrative of the trial demonstrates how the decisions of twelve people, a multitude of personal interrelationships, and many random events may decide life or death of a young man, as well as radically change the lives of everyone involved. Although, I am generally not a big fan of police procedurals or legal thrillers, I could not put down this book until the very end. In this truly captivating story, the author raised several issues that are worth your time.
