I hadn't read a Scott Turow book since probably the late 80s. I think my reading taste has advanced since those days. This book had complex legal machinations and intricately woven character parts, but was hard for me to follow - hard to remember all the characters' names. I just wasn't that impressed. Interesting story, but too long and too much intricate info for me.

Yeah ... well I kind of wish I'd stopped reading it at page 50 and thrown it into the Adriatic sea. Scott Turow is capable of much better things. His "hero" is a guy with a moral compass that barely registers; who I didn't like and I'm actually kind of glad he ended up where he ended up (won't spoil it for you); the plot was confusing ... but most annoying was how the story changed from being told in a first party narrative to a third party narrative sometimes within the same freaking paragraph. If you pick this book up and you think it looks like a good one to read, immediately put it down (or throw it into the sea). Not worth your time.

My average rating is in the low 3's, an overall rating that very much resembles a bell curve. When I first started reading this novel, it was in bed before nodding off for the night. After a 100 pages or so, I knew that this story needed to be consumed when I was fully alert, ie. during daylight hours. That is when the story became alive for me. This is a story about good gone bad, a story about a person's life, in this case a lawyer, with his practice, with his mother, with his wife, and with his willingness to go off the path of right into wrong. It is a good read, perhaps better if there were not quite so much off the beaten path into parts that could have been cut. Perhaps a Readers Digest condensed book would have been better, for me at least. I start to fidget when they start going over 500 pages. Shorter might have rung up the rare five for me. The ending was somewhat of a surprise though not unexpected, just in how.

A long book about a corruption sting that could have been shortened. The plot lines got so convoluted that I wasn’t sure toward the end who was doing what. But Turow is a craftsman, and the book was ultimately worth reading.

I did not like this book. From little thinks like Turow's insistence on shifting from referring to characters by first name then last name, even in the same paragraph. Really? Why?? Purely annoying to the reader having to keep track of what's going on in two character name-spaces. It would have been one thing if certain characters referred to each other by last name for effect, but that wasn't the case. This book is in the third person -

I suspect I was supposed to care about the main character Feaver by the end of the book - perhaps because I was anticipating such a manipulation I was immune to it. Nonetheless, I found no favor in Feavor and actually only finished the book out of curiosity: what would Turow do to this character?

In the end, there were no monumental triumphs and no spectacular defeats. The really bad guy never comes to justice, and the really good guy doesn't get his man. A whole book of buildup and no climax.

At 522 pp. in paperback, I was afraid I wouldn't finish it before the library due date. Not a problem.

This is a tale of corruption and the search for justice by whatever means. The plot often surprised me and I thoroughly enjoyed the backstories of characters as Turow introduces them into the story. While many of the legal terms were unfamiliar, Turow subtly explains enough to bring you into the fold.

There are five pages of quotes from reviews--the Wall Street Journal to People; New York Times to Glamour--and they're not wrong. Turow is an extraordinarily talented writer who kept me entertained for hours.

This book kept my interest and had some interesting characters, but I felt that there was a lot of meandering and TMI that I didn't think advanced the story. I was glad when I'd reached the end, which went out with a whimper instead of a bang.

This one was a real winner. All of the characters were interesting, the plot twisted this way and that and I get involved with several of the characters to the point where I really cared about what would happen to them. Both on a personal and legal basis. One of his best.

I'm still not sure much of anything in this genre is really my bag. But it was enough to hold our attention as my wife and I drove from Indiana to Oregon and back again. It's a lot of characters to keep track of -- particularly listening instead of reading -- but not a lot of characters that I cared much about.

Even though my beach week vacation was drowned out by Hurricane Florence (a first world problem and I'm not moaning), I still enjoyed my beach read. It could have withstood about 50 pages of much tighter editing. If it were a brief, the judge would have lost interest (really the clerk) halfway through.

Well, lately I've been giving a lot of fours that should have been a little higher, so this one gets rounded up.

He is so deft with plot, with characters, with dialog. The bad guys have good traits and the good guys have their shortcomings -- in other words, his characters are real human being. Handles many characters from their POVs in a very realistic way.

IANAL, but all the legal stuff sounds very authentic to me as does that sad decline of a character's wife because of ALS. His brave and cheery face with her, his barely hidden despair other times.

One plot jolt after another along the way. All in all a great read! (I know I'd read it before, but didn't remember enough to spoil a thing!)

Another cracking legal thriller. The only slight problem with the author is the books are very very long.