Not a Thriller, but an intriguing story about an Appellate Judge who, in his youth, committed a crime similar to that committed by four men appealing their sentences and how this weighs upon his decision-making process.

Of the three Turow books I've read, this has been my least favorite. It wasn't exciting, it wasn't suspenseful, it wasn't riveting. But still, I enjoyed it, except for the fact that I figured out who the "bad guy" was about halfway through the book and I like to be surprised.

This book was more what I would call "cerebral." It was more of a treatise on the impartiality of judges, or the lack thereof. Judge George Mason is hearing the appeal of a case involving the gang rape of a girl four years before. This, of course, reminds him of an incident in his own past and the troubling memories are keeping him from making a decision in the case.

Meanwhile, someone has been sending the judge threatening e-mails and text messages. Who, pray tell, could that be? Throw in a red herring by the name of Corazon, a gang leader with a bottomless capacity for violence whose conviction Judge Mason upheld, and you have the makings of a dime-store suspense thriller. Except you know it's not the obvious guy. It's not the second most obvious guy, either. But the third most obvious guy (and once you read the decription of the person's life, it becomes obvious they're the bad guy)...ding, ding, ding!

I give this book 3 stars because it's well-written and the legal stuff fascinated me. As for as plot...eh.

Decent, not great.

Worst book of his ever.

So apparently I tried to read Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow like 6 years ago but I marked it “couldn’t finish” here on Goodreads. Well I actually did finish Limitations but a part of me really feels like I didn’t necessarily have to. This was a short read at only 197 pages; so I could’ve finished this a lot sooner but I had put this one down and read another in between for work.

I love legal/lawyer/court room drama books and this one definitely checked that box but I honestly feel like this story line could’ve been developed a little better. I want justice in all forms so I secretly wanted the Judge’a secret to come out. We could’ve dug a little deeper into his past to help develop the story. Another thing that may ruin it for some is that this book reads like it was written by a lawyer. I don’t mind it but you can just tell that Scott Turow isn’t your typical fiction author.

Turow's shortest (197 pp) novel is one of his most interesting. At its core, someone is sending death threats to appellate judge George Mason, long a model of what a judge and lawyer should be. He is what he seems to be, so what is behind the threats? The novel tells the reader a lot about how justice works. The quote from Oliver Wendell Homes that the law is not about logic but about experience is born out by its fairly moving if imperfect conclusion. Turow has always written with precision and skill, but this novel is my favorite, and it holds up to rereading after a decade.

Although not my favorite Scott Turow story, I felt the turmoil George Mason, one of the presiding judges in the Court of Appeals, is faced with as he examines the facts in the rape case recently assigned to him. The case causes George to look into his own life, reevaluate his stance on the law and his responsibility to it. Many novels present the story from the lawyers viewpoint of a case and it was refreshing to consider the story from the judges perspective. I would like to think that most judges put this much thought into their opinions. I guess we would all certainly hope so if it was our case in front of the judge. I also enjoyed reading about the reasoning the other judges on the Appeal Court with George used to back-up their opposing opinions. The law allows for interpretation and seldom is something just black and white. The story is more about George's reaction and response to the case in front of him, than the case itself.

To complicate matters George is receiving threatening e-mails which may be connected to the case in some way. To top it all off, George's wife has been seriously ill. All combined, George begins to feel it may be time for him to stop judging others and to step down from the bench.

I enjoyed reading Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent some thirty years ago. This fiction was a hit in 1987 when it was first published. Since then I had read Burden of Proof and Identical. The fiction Limitations is my latest read by the author. It was first released in 2006.

Judge George Mason is the central figure in this novel. He sat as the senior judge of a panel of three judges of the Court of Appeals in the criminal sexual rape case of People v. Jacob Warnovits et al. The statute of limitations would bar aggrieved party from bringing a criminal case to the court more than three years after the crime. Clearly three years had passed but a video tape of the horrific sexual assault on that night surfaced in public. Can the four white boys involved be set free from the rape of a heavily-drugged black girl just by virtue of this statute of limitations?

The Court of Appeals has to decide after the Kindle County Superior Court had found these boys guilty and was sentenced to jail. It was not easy for Judge Mason to come to a decisive stand on which way he would take. The author, Scott Turow shows us how a judge of George Mason’s stature is human after all. Judge Mason had a history of his younger days some forty years ago. Would this affect his judgement? The story got interesting when Judge Mason began to get death threats as the case was in deliberation.

The book is less than 200 pages long and it can be read quickly. I would recommend that one should take time to read each page and not to rush to complete it. There were times when I did not appreciate the styles of the American conversations among the characters.

The novel Limitations has elements of suspense and anguish. Who had been threatening Judge George Mason? Read the novel to find out.

So this was my first book I read by Scott Turow as I randomly found it in a goodwill. I really like law thrillers but haven’t read many so I thought to give it a try. I definitely enjoyed it!

Another book I read in one day as it is pretty short at 197 pages but it also just kept me immersed in the plot. I haven’t connected with any of the characters but probably because this is #7 in the series so I’ll be looking for book #1 to get a better feel of the protagonist and his stories. The suspense is also pretty well done and I didn’t figure things out before the answer was revealed.

Overall I think I found another favorite author and can’t wait to find some of his other books!

The only more perfect mystery I have read is Høeg's "Smilla's Sense of Snow." And that's saying something.

I probably should not have read this book. I read Presumed Innocent when I was 14 or 15 and fell in absolute love with it. However, for some reason I never read another Scott Turow book. So, after many years of remembering my love for the one book of his I read, I picked up another one. Of course, it was bound to disappoint.

If Presumed Innocent was anything like this book, I cannot believe that I loved it as a teenager. I got bored early on with this one. The case was interesting enough, about a group of high school guys who gang-banged (and videotaped the incident) a 15-yr-old while she was unconscious, and years later, the tape surfaces and they are arrested. It sounded interesting. Especially since three of the guys are supposedly good guys now, or at least decent human beings/good citizens on the surface. If that was the whole of this book, it would have been very interesting and much more disturbing. Especially if Turow had gone on to show each of the men and how they lived good lives now. If he'd made the reader see their good lives and sympathize with them even after this brutal crime (and the way they describe it, it's pretty horrifying), it would have been one of those books that make you look at yourself and your beliefs, disbelieving that you could think two different things so strongly at once. Unfortunately, that's not what the book is about.

The book is more about the judge of the case who participated in something similiar forty years before and he struggles to judge the new case b/c of the similarities between their case and his past. That part was all so boring to me. In fact, around page 100, I started skimming and skimmed the rest of the novel. I didn't care at all about the judge, his past, his marriage, or his death threats (although they tied in at the end and made it a little better). Anyway, this was a book that could have been amazing and caused a major psychological upheaval, but Turow didn't dare go there. Or didn't because he wanted to focus on the law aspects which made his other books so successful. But for me, it was just an okay book that could have been AMAZING and instead was just lacking (and lagging). I probably will not read more of his books, but his hard-core fans will probably like this one as much as any of his others. I guess I'm just not interested in legalities as much as I am the psychological disturbance a talented author can inflict with the power he wields when weaving an absorbing story.

So, this is not a courtroom thriller. Instead, it is a look at the next level up for justice-the appeals court. I found it interesting as a former criminal lawyer, but I suspect lay people will find it wanting at best. There are two concurrent plots. One concerns a criminal case on appeal for a heinous college "gang bang" of a minor female student who was unconscious during the rape. There are two primary issues urged by the multiple male defendants. One is about the prejudicial nature of the video of the rapes taken by a defendant to preserve the event, and whether it was judicial error to admit it. There is another legal issue raised during oral argument by a pompous judge Koll which would lead to a full dismissal if the protagonist Judge George Mason decided to go along with that position. But the other is a more complex issue dealing with whether the statute of limitations, ordinarily three years in that jurisdiction, should be waived or extended because of the youth of the female, and the fact of her unconsciousness. If two of the three judges rule that strict construction of the statute of limitations applies, the case would be thrown out and the males would be set free from their six-year sentence. Hence the title of the novel-limitations. It has a double meaning. One is obvious- the statute. The other is the reality of the limitations of judges to find actual justice, if they shield their personal experiences from reaching a just conclusion.
The other plot revolves around vague death threats to the judge. I found it lacking in intensity despite the prominence of such threats in the last several years. So, I would have stuck with the legal case without the death threat investigation. You may enjoy the internal politicking of the appellate division. I did.

I learned more about the law in one short novel than I've learned from years of watching courtroom dramas on TV, plus, how to come to grips with inadvertent mistakes I may have made as a youth that I'd just as soon forget about. That, and the fact that of the countless authors I've read in my long and literature peppered life, he remains on my top ten list.