BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
(Print: 6/5/1990; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1st ed. 640 pages; unabridged.)
(Digital: Yes.)
*Audio: 5/4/2010; duration 19:38:00; B003KQMFIQ; Hachette Audio; unabridged;
(Film: Yes. Same title 1992).

SERIES:
Kindle County Series-Book 2

CHARACTERS: (not comprehensive)
Alejandro (Sandy) Stern – a Defense lawyer
Dr. Peter Stern (Sandy’s son)
Marta Stern (Sandy’s eldest daughter)
Dixon Hartnell (Sandy’s client, Silvia’s husbande, and Sandy’s brother-in-law)
Silvia Hartnell (Sandy’s sister & Dixon’s wife)
Margy Allison (Dixon’s office assistant)
Clara Stern (Sandy’s deceased wife)
Sonia Klonsky (Prosecuting assistant)
Fiona Cawley (Sandy’s neighbor and Nate’s wife)
Nate Cawley (Sandy’s neighbor, Clara’s doctor, Fiona’s husband)
Kate Granum (Sandy’s daughter, John’s wife)
John Granum (Sandy’s son-in-law, Kate’s husband, Dixon’s employee and Uncle-in-law)
Sennett (Governor leading prosecution)
Remo (Sandy’s client)
Helen Dudak (Sandy’s love interest)


SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
We (husband and I) listened to this immediately following Book 1. We did not care for this one as much. I don’t know Hubby’s precise reasons, but we agreed it was unnecessarily long, with extensive backgrounds of multiple characters, and I found it rather pornographic: waxing on about Sandy’s sex life with his deceased wife, his viewing of his neighbor’s porno tape which awakened a craving we were reminded of with every passing female. Honestly, the sex references and acts were excessive. I’m guessing that the movie, was more tame since it was made in the early 1990’s. I may watch the movie as it is peopled with class A celebrities, and it must be paired down to the essentials. The story itself—the representation of a client accused of corporate miss-doings, was good.

AUTHOR:
Scott Frederick Turow 4/12/1949. According to Wikipedia Scott, “. . . is an American author and lawyer. Turow has written 11 fiction and three nonfiction books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies.[2] Films have been based on several of his books.”

NARRATOR:
John Bedford Lloyd (1/2/1956) According to Wikipedia, John “is an American character actor . . . While studying at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was cast in the play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,[2] and he decided to become a professional actor.”

DEDICATION:
“For Annette”

GENRE:
Fiction, Legal thriller, Crime

LOCATIONS:
Kindle County, Midwest

SUBJECTS:
Lawyers, Court Room, Procedure, defendants, corporate finance, family, sex, suicide

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Part 1, Chapter 1 :
“They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring, full of resolve and a measure of hope, he would marry again. But that day, on a late afternoon near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had returned home and, with his attaché case and garment bag still in hand, called out somewhat absently from the front entry for Clara, his wife. He was fifty-six years old, stout and bald, and never particularly good-looking, and he found himself in a mood of intense preoccupation.
For two days he had been in Chicago—that city of rough souls—on behalf of his most difficult client. Dixon Hartnell was callous, self-centered, and generally scornful of his lawyers’ advice; worst of all, representing him was a permanent engagement. Dixon was Stern’s brother-in-law, married to Silvia, his sister, Stern’s sole living immediate relation and the enduring object of his affections. For Dixon, of course, his feelings were hardly as pure. In the early years, when Stern’s practice amounted to little more than the decorous hustling of clients in the hallways of the misdemeanor courts, serving Dixon’s unpredictable needs had paid Stern’s rent. Now it was one of those imponderable duties, darkly rooted in the hard soil of Stern’s own sense of filial and professional obligation.
It was also steady work. The proprietor of a vast commodity-futures trading empire, a brokerage house he had named, in youth, Maison Dixon, and a series of interlocked subsidiaries, all called MD-this and MD-that, Dixon was routinely in trouble. Exchange officials, federal regulators, the IRS—they’d all had Dixon’s number for years. Stern stood up for him in these scrapes.”
RATING: 3 stars. I plan to listen to the next one and am hoping this was the unique one of his books, being packed-full of sex, rather than that “Presumed Innocent” was the unique one, having only rare and vague references to it.

STARTED-FINISHED
8/18/2021 – 9/2/2021
( )

This is my second book by Scott Turow, and I am beginning to see that his writing style is unique, at least to me. His stories seem to be more about people's relationships and emotions rather than the mysteries of the story. But he also seems to be good with plot twists, and this one had me guessing all the way - guessing wrong, in most cases.

( )

Digital audiobook narrated by John Bedford Lloyd
3.5***

After the international success of Presumed Innocent Turow turns his attention to the defense attorney in that first effort and centers the action on Alejandro “Sandy” Stern. It opens with a shock – on returning from a business trip, Sandy discovers his beloved wife dead in their car in the garage, an apparent suicide. As he struggles to deal with this loss, he turns to his adult children, and becomes enmeshed in their problems as well as those of his brother-in-law.

This is a complicated legal mess, involving securities / commodities trading, that frankly lost me in its complexity. But I really loved how Turow wrote Sandy and his relationships with these various characters. Sandy struggles between his professional demeanor and responsibilities, and his personal relationships. It’s a messy situation (or three), and I sometimes struggled to keep things straight.

This is really more character-driven than most legal thrillers. But the plot complexities, however puzzling to me, were also what kept me interested and engaged and wondering and guessing right to the end … which is a stunner.

John Bedford Lloyd does a fine job of narrating the audiobook. He maintains a good pace and I really liked the way he interpreted Sandy. ( )

Turow has upped his game since the first book in the series. This has a more standard structure. Two mysteries, one professional and one personal, that tie together in the end. Legal and finance mixed together gives the setting some spice. ( )

I expected more thrill than I got from this second entry in Turow’s Kindle County Legal Thriller series. The first book, Presumed Innocent, was full of suspense. This one, not so much. The material was there - a questionable suicide, the disappearance of a near million dollar estate, unethical securities trading, some seriously dysfunctional family dynamics – but the overdone philosophical musings really bogged things down. It did keep me interested enough to finish but not enough that I want to pick up the next book. ( )