This book took me forever to read and after all was said and done, nothing really happened. It's supposed to be a legal thriller but there's very little to do with the law in it and it's definitely not very thrilling. It's the story of Sandy Stern, after learning his wife has committed suicide, tries to deal with his new life and a legal issue his brother in law is having. The majority of the book is spent with Sandy throwing himself at lots of different women, now that he's "free" I guess, and working on his relationships with his kids. We spend several pages simply watching him pick strawberries. The best two words that sum up this book: nothing happens.

I admit to having only skimmed the Goodreads description of this. I just knew I wanted to read another by Scott Turow. His plots are good, characterizations of his main characters close to fully-fleshed, and the writing well above average. As to this latter, I smiled when I thought of writing that here. One of the great things about reading digitally is the easy access to a dictionary. I play some word games online and am always on the lookout. It isn't often I come across such words as arcana, protea, japery, anomie. (Yes, it's the 6-letter game that has become challenging. I didn't write down the 7- and 8-letter words I looked up.)

Anyway, this opens when Alejandro (Sandy) Stern arrives home from a short trip to Chicago to discover his wife has killed herself with carbon monoxide poisoning. This isn't a spoiler - it is the first page or two. From there family relationships become front and center, including that of his brother-in-law Dixon Hartnell. Dixon is a bigger than life character who built his futures trading business from the ground up. We know he cheats on his wife, but how much cheating in business has he done? This, in fact, is what the government wants to know and why Sandy Stern is his lawyer.

I especially liked the back story on Sandy Stern. Born in Argentina, Stern was an immigrant who automatically became a US citizen upon honorable discharge from the army. He was one of those immigrants who still became weak with sentiment—and gratitude—on the Fourth of July. What an idea this country was! Parts of this is dated. Stern has a car phone, but this is before cell phones. Stern learns something about his wife's medical condition and must make discreet inquiries from his neighbor who is an MD. Oh, Sandy, if only there had been an internet! There are computers, but copies of documents are stored on microfiche. I was OK with all of that, but perhaps those of a more recent generation would be less interested.

I think this is a series that need not be read in order. This is number 2. There are references to earlier cases, but only one of those cases actually happened in the first of the series, and its result isn't revealed. I'm not positive these characters will appear in subsequent installments, though it's possible some of the minor characters will populate them. I will be reading more, that's for sure. As much as I might praise this one, I can't bring myself to give it 5-stars, though it's certainly in the top 10% of my 4-star reads.

Decent story line, but it was about the interwine of relations of a family with very little in the legal thriller category. In fact, there was little to the thriller side of Turow's novels in this book. Rather, it was an excellent character development project that he completed. this is his strong suit. some mild sexual involvement, but nothing like his first novel. More innuendo than the actual thing. I didn't like the ending. Turow seemed more interested in making it complex than interesting. I particular didn't feel how the main character ended up in the last chapter made much sense. this is when i rated it lower than i would have with a better ending. I want to read more of his books, but the ratings are not as high as i would like. My guess is people feel he writes to in depth on his character details and less on the legal thriller part of the story.

Turow's writing is still engaging, but I finally had to give up a little over a third of the way in because dear God can I not stand his characters. It's like Bonfire of the Vanities all the time up in here. Most egregious as the possible-suicide-because-of-HSV2-diagnosis subplot (I don't even know if that WAS the reason for the suicide ... I didn't get far enough for that to resolve). Oy.

what a far cry from his debut novel. I cringed at the first mention of the word "member".

I only read the first 110 pages and quickly lost interest. Not enough action...too much rumination on erections.

Might be the medium that this book was delivered to me (I listened to the very long audiobook), but it never grabbed me or intrigued me. Might be that legal thrillers just aren't for me. I should have stopped reading, another lesson in the sunk cost fallacy. The 90 to 95% part of this book was fine. The rest was forgettable - dull (I generally keep reading a book I find dull that also has a good rating on Goodreads, but this one never got exciting), ridiculous (this chubby guy is sleeping with all of these women? not even a month after his wife's suicide? and I'm supposed to like this character??), long (way too long). Probably my last one in this series unfortunately.

I'm sure I read this before, but many years ago. I had to rate it 5 stars when compared to what I've been giving 4 stars recently.

Complex and authentic novel centering around Sandy, the Argentinian attorney in Kindle County (Chicago) whose wife takes her life (right at the start of the book. This is really not a spoiler.)

Goes on to the intricacies of cheating various commodity exchanges. His brother-in-law (whom he really doesn't like or respect) has been accused of this and Sandy is defending him while dealing with the FBI, grand juries, etc etc etc. and more and more family members become embroiled with it all.

To his surprise, he has also become sexually involved with a divorced neighbor woman and fallen in unrequited lust with a married, pregnant legal opponent which adds to his general struggle to cope with his wife's death.

A long, very well-crafted novel. I might even go back and read the first, although once you know the "trick" in that one......

I loved Presumed Innocent, so I picked up Burden of Proof with some excitement. I've also read One L, so I'm accustomed to Turow's occasional bursts of precise lyrical prose and his great instincts for plotting and structure.

Burden of Proof is a couple hundred pages too long. The story drags interminably, a plodding recitation of sequential events, featuring a cast of samey husband-wife pairs. More than once I considered just reading a summary to find out what happens and save myself from having to experience it in real time. Actually I don't think it is a pacing problem; the big reveals show up at regular intervals throughout the book. The problem is that the intervening text isn't fun to read, so it *feels* like the twists take forever to come, because you're not having fun waiting for them. I often got bored enough to stop reading, then had forgotten plot points and names by the time I picked up the book again.

They say "show, don't tell". I knew Turow had an occasional tendency to tell instead of showing, but I didn't mind because the telling was entertaining. Now, I long for some showing. This is at least in part a book about grief, with many interminable passages describing Stern's inner monologue, but Turow fails to evoke grief. Clara is dead and the reader doesn't mourn her, because her character isn't presented with any heart or intimacy. Plus, straight up bad writing. Sentences like this are like stirring concrete to get through: "Abutting the streets, the docks of the trucking concerns which had located here originally to carry off what the barges brought and which eventually had supplanted them were littered with crates and spoiling produce." What supplanted what? the barges...the docks? the trucking concerns? the produce? I had to read it thrice to figure it out. This is not the kind of prose I expect from a writer of Turow's skill.

I also felt uninspired by the protagonist. Candidly, I don't want to read about a squat, aging widower getting a series of erections! Sandy Stern makes a great side character, but he's too reserved to make a great protagonist. He fails to do anything the least bit surprising. His instinct for secrecy gets tiring. Totally weird secrecy, like, you hid your pitch-deafness from your wife for over three decades? ...why?

Stern's written to be so boringly sexist, too. Every woman is introduced with a male-gazey description of her breasts. I know Stern is old-fashioned / experiencing sexual reawakening and the story's told from his perspective, but Turow fails to interrogate his sexism even the slightest bit, leaving us with the impression that this is how Turow sees the world too. If your protagonist feels up a female stranger in an elevator and then follows her down the street with scant encouragement, you should at least give a nod to the fact that he's clearly a creep, instead of continuing to cast him as genteel.

This book is like Stern's Erotic Journey from Milan to Minsk. He beds every female character. I keep expecting to hear porn music.

In general the approach to sexual matters seems oddly juvenile. The pearl-clutching over herpes made me roll my eyes. Herpes is not that big a deal. Yes, it can't be cured, but most people never experience an outbreak, most of the rest experience only mild outbreaks, and medicine almost entirely eliminates the possibility of infecting a partner. It's only a hideous scandal among the woefully ignorant.

All in all: hard pass.

I was hooked at first with the background of Clara and why she committed suicide and wanted to learn more. However, how the story played out was a serious let down. Everyone played poor Sandy for a schmuck while he was getting it on with anything that moved. Ridiculously erotic for a “legal thriller”. There were really no thrilling legal moves at all through the whole book. While I did appreciate the authors attention to detail, it was overkill and I ended up skimming some sections just to get to the point. Ultimately, Clara committed suicide because of her kids’ manipulations and games, and because she had herpes. Crazy.

Τον τελευταίο καιρό με εξιτάρουν τα δικαστικά θρίλερ. Βέβαια, στα ελληνικά δεν υπάρχουν πολλά τέτοιου είδους βιβλία. Πρόσφατα, λοιπόν, διάβασα το "Αθώος μέχρι αποδείξεως του εναντίου" του Scott Turow και μου άρεσε. Έτσι, άρχισα να ψάχνω βιβλία του συγκεκριμένου συγγραφέα, το οποία τελικά είχαν εξαντληθεί. Το συγκεκριμένο το ξετρύπωσα α[π τη δημοτική βιβλιοθήκη της πόλης μου.
Η αλήθεια είναι ότι δεν με ενθουσίασε. Ουσιαστικά, ασχολείται με οικονομικά αδικήματα. Μη όντας γνώστης οικονομικών εννοιών κάπου χάθηκα και κουράστηκα. Τα προσωπικά δράματα του δικηγόρου ήταν πιο ενδιαφέροντα από το κυρίως θέμα.

Update #1
Kate/Katy (who he calls Cara), Clara, Cal, Claudia, Cawley, Klonsky…Kindle County. This is your story. You get to PICK the names, Mr. Turow. This was the choice you made?

And was Mr. Turow perpetually horny the entire time he wrote this book?

Anyway I’m a third of the way through and I’m still waiting for something to happen.

Update #2
Two-thirds of the way through and I’m finally engrossed. Once I began appreciating the pace, the book started growing on me. I am eager to see how the plot lines merge.

Final verdict: It was good. I wasn’t as blown away as others, but it was a good story with detailed characters and a complex yet easy-to-follow plot.