Limitations

If you are looking for what the commercial reviews have billed as yet another classy "legal thriller" in vintage Turow style, then you'll be disappointed. "Limitations" is unlike any of his previous work, and delightfully so. Not a grave departure, mind you. Not like John Grisham doing a Pavlovian swerve into Italian vistas or football towns. It is still couched in a legal setting: a judge receiving threatening emails from an unknown spammer. The techie stuff is pretty accurate and the plot is, well, conspicuously devoid of your usual twists and turns. Instead, it is atmospheric and mulling, almost like a suave noir version of The Practice directed by, say, Sophia Coppola. Expect to find similarly gritty themes on the issues of crime and forgiveness (inter-racial rape, juvenile gangs) argued with an educated balance that calls our more fundamental prejudices into question. The novel is written in a present continuous tense. I found this distracting at first, but soon warmed up to it. In a way it lent a delicate immediacy to the proceedings. The spotlight is not so much on the police procedural bits as on coping with the dusk of one's career and having that introspection exacerbated by threats to all that one holds dear. In this case, for example, the precarious health of his wife dwells more in our judge's mind than his own imminent death. The couple's grown-in sense of love was one of the highlights for me. If you savor Turow's prescient style of writing, of which there are ambrosial dollops in exhibition here, and don't necessarily need courtroom showdowns or grandstanding villains to take to a story, then buy this fast and fantastic read. It'll keep you on tenterhooks for reasons not usually found in books of its "genre".

I've been a fan of Turow's legal mystery novels since _Presumed Innocent,_ many years ago. Among other things, I like the way time passes in Kindle County at the same rate as in our world. Rusty Sabich, protagonist of that first novel, is now Chief Judge, and George Mason, the hero of this relatively short book, has gone from criminal defense lawyer in _Personal Injuries_ to senior appellate court judge. I also like the way Turow's book titles always turn out to have several meanings in terms of the plot. First, there's the current case facing the appellate panel, a high school rape case that occurred half a dozen years before in which the fifteen-year-old victim was drunk and passed out and didn't know she had been raped -- until the videotape the perps had made of it surfaced. Does the tape make a difference in the way the trial judge interpreted the statute of limitations on opening the prosecution? What about the fact that she was a minor? At the same time, Judge Mason has been getting threatening emails and text messages, and neither the chief of court security nor the FBI can handle on who's doing it -- but everyone suspects a thoroughly evil Latino gang boss presently in solitary at the supermax prison. (Being locked away wouldn't impair his actions that much and they all know it.) Mason is a very fair person, and he works hard at it, but under threat we all have our personal limitations, too. And then there's his wife, Patrice, under treatment for thyroid cancer, which adds even more mental strain. And will he finally decide to send in his petition for a second ten-year term on the bench? He has lots of competitive colleagues who want to know the answer to that one. As always, Turow is a master of plot and of making the legal ins and outs comprehensible, but even more, he creates fully realized characters, people you can believe exist and whom the reader cares about. His style is economical, not a wasted word anywhere. This is one of the very few authors whose new work I always grab with no hesitation, even when I'm in complete ignorance of the plot. I know he will never be less than stellar.

Scott Turow's LIMITATIONS receives Stephen Lang's Broadway acting strengths as it provides a new legal mystery revolving around George Mason, who returns to life in a new story of a dangerous rape case.

How many people are really qualified to be a judge? That is to decide the guilt or innocence of those accused of a crime or the liability of citizens in private civil actions. In many cases, where a jury is present in a trial court, the judge decides the law, not the facts. Sometimes the trial court judge is also the trier-of-fact. I've seen a lot of trial court judges because I testify as an expert witness. I also read a lot court decisions. And having grown up in Cook County, Illinois, I know that a lot of judges are just plain corrupt or incompetent political hacks. Scott Turow writes of George Mason, not a trial court judge, but an appellate judge. Appellate judges are reviewers. Only in exceptional circumstances may they take note of facts not introduced at the trial court level. But State v. Warnovits is argued before a three-judge panel, which Mason leads. One judge, Koll, wants the court to take note of someething that wasn't argued before the trial court - it's an exception the appellate court can make. The other judge wants the appellate court to override a state law on the statute of limitations and send the four young men to prison for six years for a long ago rape. George Mason is a dedicated conscientious, lawyer who gave up a lucrative criminal defense practice to join the appellate court. He is, for very personal reasons from 40 years ago, torn by the decision he has to make in this case. At the same time, he is worried about his wife, Patrice, who is undergoing chemotherapy. And finally he is concerned about the threatening e-mails he is receiving. The story moves at a good pace. Mason tries to balance everything in his life. Whether to run for retention on the court - his seat is greatly desired by other lawyers who grown tired of the rigors of practicing law and want the sweet security of sitting on the bench. He is worried about his wife and keeping secret the threats, current and past, to his happy life. Above all, Mason wants to do justice as best as he can. There are many twists and turns in this relatively short novella that grew out of a serial Turow did for The New York Times Magazine. Mason's character is well described and has substantial depth. All of the other charactes play supporting roles and are very thing. But the main story revolves around Mason's inner-conflicts, so the emphasis on his character alone is warranted. Overall, it's a satisfying story, though I did not particularly like the way Turow ends it - and, of course, I can't divulge the reason for not liking the end because that would be a spoiler. Turow spends some time weaving computer forensics - which is what I do for a living into the story - and he needs better assistance with that subject. Finally, my very favorable opinion is not at all influenced by one of the characters being named "Sapperstein," my name with an added "p". More seriously, Turow offers what I think is an interesting look into the "judicial temperment". A good re

Scott Turow and I may have one philosophical disagreement (a comment he wrote in an op-ed piece once), but who cares? He writes beautifully and his plots are ingenious and engaging. In my review of Robert Heinlein's _Starman_Jones_, I wrote that the book has various readily identifiable flaws that it would be easy for me to list, and that those don't matter at all. In particular, I gave it five stars despite those imperfections. Now I see a few reviewers here pointing out flaws in this book (one of them cites a debatably run-on sentence). Hey, I can do that too. After finishing this book, I went back and read some passages a second time, and I find that some of the clues to the identity of the culprit are absolutely brilliantly subtle. I understand that they were clues only because after finishing the book, I know who the culprit is, and they're subtle enough that I didn't notice them until the incomplete second reading. Turow's ability as a fiction writer seems to result not only from the conjunction of his first-hand experience as a lawyer and his mastery of language, but also of what seems like a thorough knowledge of the Dark Side of human nature. (My one possible philosophical disagreement with him is that his knowledge of the Bright Side may have a piece missing.) But gratuitous nitpicking can be a lot of fun, so let's try a few (those who don't like English usage discussions are hereby ordered to skip this paragraph): (1) On page 17, he says "forebearer" where I would say "forebear". Google bears me out: "forebearer" gets only 20,200 hits; "forebear" gets 289,000. So there. (2) Page 91: "to revenge himself". Should that say "to avenge himself"? (3) Page 191: "Now he trips downstairs..." Was he injured when he tripped on the steps? No---the verb "trip" is being used here as a verbed noun; he made a trip downstairs to the office of the court's chief file clerk. The verbing of nouns in English has a venerable history of many centuries of use by the best writers, but intelligent people express horror at every novel instance. It seems only old well-established verbed nouns are respectable (e.g. "verbed" is a shady usage permitted only because of my Censorious Grammarian's license and then only when I'm at least a little bit sarcastic). (4) p. 188: "It is a long rule of law that defendants must take their victims as they find them." I'd have guessed that a _long_ rule of law would require more words than that---maybe even a run-on sentence of the kind that some lawyers might pride themselves on. Perhaps unbeknownst to me it has long been a rule of law that lawyers use the word "long" in that way, in which case the reader is hereby ordered to skip item (4) of the present list. (5) p. 42: The terms "parking structure" and "parking garage" appear. I wonder how many Americans realize how much geographic variation there is in the meanings of these and related terms in this country. What the British denote by the self-explanatory t