Presumed Guilty

Turow brings Rusty Sabich back at 77, retired to Wisconsin's fictional Skageon region, and pulls him into defending his partner Bea's adopted son Aaron after Aaron's girlfriend is found dead following their joint disappearance. The racial dynamics — Aaron is Black, the rural county's justice system is not neutral — give the plot more explicit social weight than the earlier Kindle County books, and reviewers singled out Turow's courtroom choreography as still the novel's strongest instrument, the procedural machinery he's spent four decades perfecting. More measured notices pointed to the book's length: at over 500 pages, the case-building and interiority slow the momentum, so it reads more as a methodical character study of Rusty's late-life reckoning than as the taut suspense engine of the original Presumed Innocent.