TESTIMONY

Fiction

Sticking to your ribs

TESTIMONY
By Scott Turow
477 pp. Grand Central Publishing Group

Reviewed by Jack Shakely

In our current world of courtroom drama novels, we have John Grisham, who’s been phoning them in for years, James Patterson, who turns out to be not a single author, but a factory of writers, and Scott Turow.

Thank goodness. Turow is a master of legal drama, and Testimony may be his best to date. Its sharp observations and page-turning plot twists are pure Turow and pure pleasure.

Like his other nine novels, Testimony begins in Kindle County (a poorly disguised Cook County and Turow’s Yoknapatawpha), but it quickly launches attorney William ten Boom across the Atlantic to The Hague, and its various courts for war crimes and international disputes.  Turow writes in the first person, so ten Boom and the reader can explore together the arcane world of The Hague, where lawyers still wear black robes with starched lacy dickies and nothing is exactly as it seems. Turow’s personal background as an attorney is again on display, giving us insights into international law while providing us with Cliff notes on our own system of jurisprudence. And he accomplishes it without sounding preachy or judgmental.

Testimony takes us from The Hague to the mysterious and impoverished Roma communities of Bosnia, where atrocities against the gypsies seem unbelievably cruel. Or maybe just unbelievable. Or maybe fabricated. Or maybe not.

The book is peppered with some of the most interesting characters in Turow’s stable. There is Esma, who’s good in the courtroom and dazzling in the sack; Moos, a beer-guzzling forensic scientist whose Australian English often needs translation; General Merriwell, a fool for love whose honesty otherwise is the lodgepole of the story; and Attila, who can get it for you wholesale and defies description.

One of the reasons Turow is such an interesting writer is because there are autobiographical smudges and fingerprints across every one of his pages – not just his lawyerly knowledge, but his insightful rendering of ten Boom’s flaws and insecurities. In fact, at the very time Turow was writing about ten Boom’s mid-life crisis, he was going through the break-up of his own long-time marriage. He lets us see the wounds, often self-inflicted.

Four hundred pages deep into Testimony, I still hadn’t figured out what the real crime was or who did it. What a pleasure to read something that, as my grandmother used to say, “sticks to your ribs.” I’m going back to re-read the other nine Kindle County novels. And maybe take in a Trappers’ game.

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Jack Shakely is an award-winning author whose novel The Lighthorsemen will be published in October.