5 Legal Stars
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A 2013 Listing Of My Books When I Joined Goodreads.
I first found Scott Turow with his first book, Presumed Innocent. It later became a huge film hit. As you can see below, Mr. Turow has continued to produce satisfying legal thrillers.

Presumed Innocent (Kindle County Legal Thriller #1)
The Burden of Proof (Kindle County Legal Thriller #2)
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I didn't enjoy this book as much as Presumed Innocent.

The story is well set up and I like the protagonist, his emotional journey is a critical part of the story.
However, I felt this book had perhaps been rushed and needed a good edit. The middle was flabby with a heavy focus on the protagonist's sexual exploits which didn't really maintain my interest. It was a little self-indulgent, lost the story momentum and I became impatient to get back to the main legal thriller plot. When we got back to it, I found myself carried along, intrigued about how it would be resolved.

In the end, the legal thriller plot was satisfying and the storyline came to an intriguing conclusion with an interesting twist (I had been wondering how it would be resolved).

Overall, I enjoyed the novel but it suffered from comparison with Presumed Innocent, which I really loved.

What makes a book? The story or the characters? All I know with this one is that Sandy Stern was a disgusting man.

Alejandro (Sandy) Stern, very successful 56 year-old lawyer, with three grown children arrives home to find his wife of over 30 years has committed suicide. Overwhelmed and confused by this, Stern tries to understand what has happened. Immediately after his wife's funeral, Stern has to turn back to the law to defend his brother-in-law, Dixon Hartnell, who is the target of an increasingly complex investigation by a federal grand jury. Dixon is a very rich and very successful owner of a commodities futures brokerage. Stern is devote to his sister, the wife of Dixon. To add complication, Stern's son-in-law works for Dixon. There are many intrigues with Stern, his family, his devotion to his sister and coming to terms with his wife's death. A good read.

The second in the Kindle County Series after Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof is a long slow burn that gets progressively hotter the further into it you get. After the completely unexpected and unexplainable suicide of his wife, Sandy Stern, brilliant attorney hero of Presumed Innocent works to put his life back together and understand why his wife took her life.

Full of secrets and lies, the story is one of how a family evolved and grew apart while maintaining the façade of normalcy. Character driven rather than action driven, this is a very strong and powerful book with interesting, complicated characters. The mysteries are superbly well plotted, with plenty of red herrings and plot twists you don’t see coming, but everything plausible.

My only quibble was the length, which should be about 100 pages shorter. A solid 4 stars.

How this became a best seller I'm not sure. This is the tale of a male attorney whose wife commits suicide. This is a slow-moving and unfortunate novel that isn't bettered by the widow sleeping with everything in sight. Very disappointing read. Don't read this book expecting the quality of Turow's first novel or you will definitely be disappointed.

Ya desde el principio crees q la historia va ser bastante truculenta xq nada más en el primer capítulo habemus suicidio: Stern, prestigioso abogado, llega a su casa tras un viaje de negocios y descubre que su esposa Clara se ha suicidado sin motivo aparente. A partir de aquí, el libro va a través del viaje de Stern en la búsqueda de respuestas, no solo sobre los motivos de su esposa sino sobre la verdad de su matrimonio. Como preocupación colateral a su cuñado le cae una investigación de la Fiscalía General y aunq al principio una cosa no tiene nada q ver con la otra, resulta q siempre sí, se cruzan los cables.
No le tenía mucha fe a este autor, xq no me había gustado demasiado su otra laureada novela "Se presume inocente". Pero tengo q decir q me equivoqué. La trama es sumamente interesenta, y el suspense más q suficiente para llevarte de la nariz durante todo el libro. El final no te lo esperas en absoluto y auq como buena amante de la romántica, me habría gustado un poco más de romance, obviamente este libro no va de eso y no le hace falta en absoluto.

A tightly woven mystery thriller with an mostly ethical lawyer at it's center. Well written prose and believable characters inhabit the pages. There are interesting explorations into family, love and death. My first Scott Turow novel, but not my last.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILSt
(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:t
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: t
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:t
“For Annette”

GENRE:t
Fiction, Legal thriller, Crime

LOCATIONS:t
Kindle County, Midwest
t
SUBJECTS:t
Lawyers, Court Room, Procedure, defendants, corporate finance, family, sex, suicide

SAMPLE QUOTATION:t
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:t3 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-FINISHEDt
8/18/2021 – 9/2/2021

This is one of the worst books ever written by a really good author. And believe it or not, this is my second reading of it. Why did I torture myself you ask? I was re-reading the series to familiarize myself as I pick up where I left the series. Presumed Innocent (the first in the series) was a pretty good legal thriller. I probably loved it the first time around and even liked it the second with a couple of irritating moments but nothing like this. I rated it one star the first time and would rate it less if I could this time. Not one of the characters was remotely like able, maybe the daughter Marta and the aunt Sylvia but that’s it. This is not the Stern that I admired so much as a great lawyer in the first book. He seems so stupid here. I’m actually scared to keep reading. I don’t remember much about book 3.

This book was such a huge disappointment. I was hooked by it's predecessor (Presumed Innocent) but here I think Scott Turrow simply got carried away and tried to write an epic in the manner of Gone With The Wind or Buddenbrooks, nothing wrong with that, but if you're attempting to write a thriller then your book needs to thrill. Burden of Proof does not do that. The central character cogitates at every available opportunity and stultifies the story. Lots and lots of introspective passages with well-constructed sentences do not add to the book.

I think the author was trying to produce the effect of a long running Spanish telenova, replete with lots of flashbacks between the protagonist and his wife. Alejandro Stern is just too ponderous to be of much interest. His grandiloquent manner of speaking begins to grate after a while.

The scene in which he discovers his dead wife had herpes is unintentionally funny and the scene in which his son Peter inspects him for herpes would have been funny were it not so laden with formality.

This is a very self-indulgent novel. I think Scott Turrow, after the success of Presumed Innocent, decided to impress his fans with his literary prowess and ultimately failed to deliver. This book is worth reading for aspiring writers because it gives you some guideline of what not to do if you are writing thrillers.

1) Don't be politically correct with dialogue. There is a passage where the protagonist's brother-in-law remonstrates with two FBI agents because they want him to come down town whilst getting ready to go to his sister's funeral. In his exasperation he calls them: 'You crummy so and so's!"... Really

2) If your characters ruminate at every possible opportunity you ruin the story.

3) Lengthy characters with well-constructed sentences do not add to the quality of a thriller. Maybe, an epic, but not a thriller.

All in all, this is a book where the author simply let himself go. I feel he should have had more respect for the money paying reader.

3.5 Stars