I'm not sure how much this had to do with law, but I thought it had a lot to do with human nature. The style of writing was a bit different and might be a turn off for some people because it is not the norm. For me, that made it a bit more interesting. Things kept changing as you went along in the book. The who and why was a constant mystery. Not really a constant mystery in that you thought you knew, but you didn't.

I never quite remember why I stop reading Turow novels so this will be my reminder:

they're depressing! the lead characters are hopelessly mired in personal problems and struggle to focus, using the job as the object.

Sorry. this is as well written with a good plot but, really, Kindle County with a 43 story building? I don't think so.

I read 100 pages and then just gave up. It is painfully boring.

Very Different!

I've read quite a few of Mr. Turow's work. This one stands out. I'm not not so sure, in a good way. I think I was generous with the stars. I did enjoy his humor. For once. If you're looking for a great plot, to follow, wrong book. The plot was actually the background. It sort of came, and went. The story is about Mack Malloy. Who's a great investigator, but not so great a person. Who's great at playing the victim. About hundred pages too long.

Mack Malloy is a partner in one of Kindle County's top law firms. An ex-cop who joined the firm on a wave of enthusiasm and optimism, he now feels himself to be on the way down, and possibly out. Bert Kamin, gifted, erratic and combative, is one of the firm's star litigators and he has disappeared.

I’m not exactly racing through this Kindle County series. This is the third in the series. I read number two seven months ago! Pleading Guilty was published twenty years ago. So you can see that it took me a while to get to it.

Mack Malloy is a lawyer at the Gage & Griswell law office. Maybe low man on the totem pole even though he has been there twenty years. The daytime life of the firm “is devoted to making the world safe for airlines, banks and insurance companies.” Mack will tell you: “We all know my story. I’m too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it.”

I wasn’t prepared properly for the first surprise as Mack prowled in someone else’s apartment:

I went to the kitchen to check out the fridge, still trying to see how long our hero had been gone, another old cop move, smell the milk, check the pull date. When I opened the fridge, there was a dead guy staring back.

That is quite some way to end a chapter. Turow likes to end each chapter with a significant final sentence or paragraph. I guess that is not too unusual for a mystery writer now that I think about it. Later there is a good follow up about the refrigerator man.

In this book there is a page about Mack falling off the wagon. Here is one paragraph of that fall:

So much of life is will. I had spun the golden cap off the pint before I knew what I’d done, and repeated that old phrase to myself. I had heard it from Leotis Griswell, not long before he died. I looked into the open bottle as if it were a blind eye, and was reminded for whatever reason of looking down on something else, another seat of pleasure. The sharp perfume of the alcohol filled me with a pang, as acute and painful as a distant sighting of a lovely woman whose name I’ll never know.

For some reason I thought this was beautiful and read it several times as I thought about an alcoholic I had known. One day she decided to go to AA and stop drinking. She tells me her life has gotten gradually better since that moment. This book took me back to that moment, a beautiful moment of hope for the future.

This is a story about a search for a missing man – who happens to be a big shot lawyer in a big firm – who has evidently absconded with $5.6 million. The money is from the escrow account for the settlement of lawsuits against the world’s biggest airline for a crash that killed 247 people. This money has been hanging around for a while and when it is all sorted out it looks like the airline is going to make money because they were sued. This is not news they want to share so the bosses suggest that if they don’t find the missing lawyer they just cover it up. This is not a missing person story with a lot of action. It is big action when the drunk Mack Malloy throws up on a kid stealing the radio out of his car. Or when he plays racket ball or gets thrown out of someone’s apartment. Big time action? No.

If thinking is an action, then there is plenty of action. Thoughts everywhere including volumes from Mack.

I’d rather believe in will than fate. I drink or don’t drink. I’ll try to find Bert or I won’t. I’ll take the money and run or else return it. Better to find options than that bondage of cause and effect. It all goes back to Augustine. We choose the Good. Or the Evil. And pay the price.

Not necessarily deep but maybe foreshadowing thoughts.
I gave the first two books in the series four stars and expected to do the same for this one. It was billed as a thriller but I found very little that got my adrenalin going. White collar crime is not thrilling by its very nature. It tries to remain hidden. There was some intrigue here and the outcome was not clear to me until the final pages.

On the basis of the two previous four star books, I am giving Turow the benefit of the doubt and three stars. The quality of the next book in the series will determine whether I place any priority on moving on to other Turow books.

Ugh!!! I wrote a decent review, and goodreads glitched and ate it.

Warning for spoilers and series spoilers.

This book is probably an acquired taste. The narrator, Mack, is unlikable. He's a former cop, divorced, middle-aged, and currently makes a living as a mediocre attorney at a large firm. He's been sober a few years and has a teenage son he refers to as "the loathsome child." All of his relationships, professional and personal, are dysfunctional. A cop he worked with back in the day hates him for lying. The cop is crooked.

Mack's views on a particular female coworker are repulsive. He refers to her as "having a case of hotpants" and then details her sexual exploits.... which, of course, reflects on her, not the men she's with (also coworkers). She has feelings for Mack, but he doesn't reciprocate. Mack's ex-wife came out as a lesbian to him after she was out with a female coworker.... Mack admits that he can't count the nights he didn't come home, but she dared to be gone one night, and he's bitter and petty.

Then there's Jake. Mack got his first job as a cop because of help from Jake's dad. Later, Jake turned to Mack when he needed help cheating on the bar exam. Jake is currently the in-house counsel for the firm's largest client.... Mack is one round of layoffs from the end of his underwhelming career. Mack is jealous.

Over all of it, there's a senior partner who champions the outcasts and has variously prevented people from getting sacked.

The book opens with the senior partners asking Mack to track down Bert. Bert is an unreliable asshole attorney who goes missing from time to time.... but this time, he took 5 million in client funds. The bosses want him to come back and give the money up, and they won't report it. They don't want the irs or the client looking too hard, and they want to protect their reputation.

I thought maybe they were going to use Mack to find Bert and have Bert killed.... but no. Mack finds Bert's house, and there's a dead guy in the fridge. Bert is running.

It turns out Bert is gay and has a thing with the son of a Black female coworker... who has a romantic history with the senior partner who is protecting all the misfits. Bert and his friend were involved with fixing basketball games. Bert is running, but he's alive.

At one point, it looks like Mack might become a convenient suspect for the murder because of how much the cop hates him.

Then it looks like Mack will be justified.... maybe he is just a guy trying hard but getting screwed over by ungrateful people. It seems Jake stole the money and framed Bert.

Then, in the last few pages, we learn that Mack is the thief. He plans to abandon the son he hates and spend the rest of his life drunk. He was trying to destroy the people he thought had wronged him.

Personally, I love the unreliable narrator. It's not as good as the first book in the series (Presumed Innocent....a DA stands trial for the murder of his gf who was actually killed by his wife), but it was entertaining. I will keep reading the series.

Plot twists that are truly surprising

Throw tells a linear story that leaves you jolted as thoroughly as if he were messing with the timeline. Wait -what??! The central one - what if and underwritten by enough money to never think of it again - is delicious, made my head jangle and too excited for sleep. The other has my brain going back over how I missed that turn amid all the smart and sassy repartee. what happens - the.events.and conversations that unfold - is turned on its head first by the why and then the how. Stupendous!

In isolation, I might have rated it more highly. It's chief problem is that it pales in comparison to Presumed Innocent and Burden of Proof. Granted, Turow set a really high bar with his first 2 legal thrillers. Compared to those 2, this story felt a little more disjointed; the characters a little harder to care about.

Pleading Quilty has a first person narrative voiced in the noir style of Double Indemnity and as such it is completely different than any of the other Turow novels that I have read. Malloy, the narrator, is morally compromised and self pitying but still somehow likable, or, if not likable, at least entertaining. The whole thing is pretty bleak because Malloy's view of the world is pitiless.
"Rational self-interest is Carl's creed. He worships at the altar of the free market. The same way Freud thought everything was sex, Pagnucci believes all social interaction, no matter how complex, can be adjusted by finding a way to put a price on it. Urban housing. Education. We need competition and profit motive to make it all work. It is, I know, quite a theory. Let everybody struggle to get their bucket in the stream and then do what they like with the water they fish out. Some will make steam, some will take a drink, a few fellows or ladies will decide to take a bath."

A prominent law partner has disappeared (again) from the firm. This time it's different. There is $5.6 million also missing through a mysterious transfer of funds to an off-shore bank. His friend Mack is tasked to find him and get back the money. Right...
A story is well told but... if it was a film, it would probably be rated GP-13 for language and sexual situations.

Apparently, I started reading "Pleading Guilty" in November 2016. Reading it was mostly an on-and-off thing throughout the years. At one point, it just fell into obscurity because it couldn't hold my attention long enough unless I turned on my stubborn mode.

In 2021, I decided to pick this book up again and continue from where I left off. I thought it was an easy way to add a book to my 2021 reading challenge but I was wrong.

As my eyes slowly crawled through the pages, years after I left it alone, it was clear why this book had gone into the "abandoned books" shelf in the first place. If it weren't for my stubbornness, I'm certain that it would never have made it out of that shelf.