At the close of legal-thriller novelist Scott Turow's second book, The Burden of Proof, Sonia Klonsky was a young prosecutor in Kindle County Courthouse with a failing marriage, an infant daughter, and a single mastectomy. Now, as the narrator of Turow's latest novel, she's a Superior Court Judge presiding over the murder trial of one Nile Eddgar, accused of arranging the slaying of his ghetto-activist mother, June. Turow attempts a sort of social history of the 60s in this ambitious mystery, but the most vivid passages come when the gangbangers of the Black Saints Disciples take center stage.


From Library Journal
Turow once again proves that there is more substance in a single page of one of his novels than in the entire works of John Grisham or any other author in the legal thriller genre. In this latest, the mother of a probation officer is shot near a gang-infested housing project, provoking charges that her son orchestrated the killing. The ensuing trial reunites a group of affluent Sixties activists who knew each other in their student days. The courtroom scenes are energetic and intelligent, and Turow never resorts to playing good guys vs. bad guys. Nor does he subject his characters to tearful, revelatory testimony while on the stand. His dialog is snappy and believable?aside from some awkwardly rendered sections featuring the leader of an urban street gang?and his insight into his characters' petty motivations and misplaced love is dead on. All public libraries should have a copy of this fine novel.?Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Teresa Carpenter
"The Laws of Our Fathers" tackles an ambitious theme: How do children break free of their elders to live meaningful, whole lives?


From AudioFile
Scott Turow's fifth book shifts between the present-day trial of Nile Eddgar, a probation officer charged with arranging the drive-by murder of his mother by members of the Black Saints Disciples, and the student days of Nile's parents in the '60's. The same characters are portrayed throughout, so having three readers helps the listener switch between the past and present. The narrators don't interact but take turns presenting chapters. Blair Brown narrates the chapters in the voice of Judge Sonia "Sonny" Klonsky, and Joe Grifasi and Joe Morton provide the narration for the other chapters. All three do a credible job, especially in capturing the dialect of Ordell "Hardcore" Trent and other gang members. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
With the same masterful narrative technique used in his previous best-sellers, Chicago attorney Turow delivers another dense, exciting legal thriller. The setting is his usual fictional Kindle County, and we revisit Judge Sonia "Sonny" Klotsky, last seen in The Burden of Proof (1990). Sonny, a newcomer to the bench after the district cleared out numerous corrupt justices in the latest sting, finds herself sitting as judge in a high-profile murder case--a juryless bench trial, no less. Although confident in her knowledge and application of the law, Sonny feels an incessant knot in her stomach over being the sole arbiter of the lives of heinous though pitiful defendants. Only adding to her inner struggle is the fact that this particular trial--where a senator's son allegedly had a hand in murdering his mother when he was, in fact, trying to kill the senator himself--becomes something of a reunion of 1960s college chums, for Sonny was in a virtual commune with the defendant and his family, the defense attorney, and, most poignant of all, her former lover turned journalist. Turow, while telling a fascinating crime story, skillfully turns the book into a tale of love and loss, of family and friendship. Expect much demand. Mary Frances Wilkens


From Kirkus Reviews
The undisputed king of contemporary legal intrigue (Pleading Guilty, 1993, etc.) offers a sumptuous triple-decker tracing the tangled roots of an apparently accidental murder back 25 years. The present-day story begins with the death of inoffensive June Eddgar, victim of a daybreak drive-by shooting. Investigating officers, who waste no time turning eyewitness Ordell Trent, a.k.a. Hardcore, figure the dead woman, who'd been driving a car belonging to her husband, State Senator Loyell Eddgar, was killed in error for him, and on the orders of Eddgar's son Nile, Hardcore's probation officer, whose reasons for ordering his father's execution Kindle County prosecutors are only too eager to unfold to Judge Sonia Klonsky. But Sonny Klonsky brings her own baggage to the case. Back in her college days, her political convictions and her hell-raising social life had brought her together with June Eddgar, unofficial den mother to campus radicals; Nile's baby-sitter Seth Weissman, who shared Sonny's bed and board; and Hobie Tuttle, the D.C. lawyer who's now defending Nile. As the case against Nile lurches forward- -replete with all the courtroom razzle-dazzle you'd expect from Turow, and the revelations of character and milieu you wouldn't expect from anyone else--Sonny's voice increasingly yields to Seth's. Determined to avoid the draft by fleeing to Canada, and devoutly (if symbolically) attached to the cause of Cleveland Marsh, a jailed Black Panther whose bail he wishes he could post, he plots to combine his two goals by faking his own kidnapping--a plot that spirals out of control with fatal consequences for himself, his parents, and, yes, the Eddgar family. Beneath the layers of deep legal deviousness, Turow never lets you forget that his characters lived and loved before they ever got dragged into court, and that they have lives to go back to after the final gavel comes down. (First serial rights to Playboy; film rights to Universal; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It was another drive-by shooting in one of Kindle County's most drug-plagued housing projects--but the victim was the ex-wife of a politician. Now this explosive case is about to reunite an unlikely group of men and women who first bonded in the revolutionary fires of the 1960s . . . and show a once-crusading female judge, driven by both her fears and her courage, just how devastating a single wrong choice can be.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Unlike some of his fellow lawyers-turned-novelists, Turow takes his time with his books: one every three years since Presumed Innocent. This time it has been spectacularly worth the wait. Laws of Our Fathers is a rich, complex and ultimately profoundly moving tale that, like all Turow's work, is quarried from the mysteries of human character rather than simply from the sometimes too-easy drama of the courtroom. It begins in the gritty setting of an inner city slum and in the mind of a soul-dead black gangster. An ambush is being laid and when it is sprung, the wrong person, an elderly white woman, the wife of a state senator, is dead. Was her hapless son somehow involved in the murder plot, and what role did the senator play? The hot-potato case comes into the court of Judge Sonia (Sonny) Klonsky (remembered from The Burden of Proof), and the courtroom soon looks like Old Home Week as it becomes clear that Sonny, black defense lawyer Hopie Tuttle, state senator Loyell Eddgar, and observing newspaper columnist Seth Weissman all knew each other back in the wild student days of the '60s. The courtroom scenes that follow are swift-moving and surprising, especially since Turow has the nerve to depict a "bench trial,'' in which a judge alone hears evidence, so there is no playing to a jury, and the scenes are worked out dramatically person to person. But the legal aspects of his novel, highly dramatic though they are, are not what most interests the author. The book is in fact basically about family relationships: the passionately leftist Eddgar's with his wife and son; Seth's with his austere, penny-pinching father, survivor of a Nazi death camp; and Sonny's with the memories of her wild communist mother and with her own precious, late-in-life young daughter. Most fine novels have a keen sense of the passage of time, and Turow's grasp of the revolutionary fervor of the '60s and how it has later calmed into rueful, if still compassionate, acceptance, is masterly. A fine stroke too, is his use of the funeral eulogies for Seth's father to sum up, touchingly, what these often embattled and misled people have learned with such difficulty in their lives. There are minor flaws: the multiple personal perspectives in the narrative are not always as well differentiated as they might be, and Sonny's on-again, off-again feelings toward Seth become somewhat repetitious. But these are quibbles in the light of Turow's grandly ambitious achievement: to focus the profoundest struggles of two generations through one sordid, emblematic crime.

Library Journal

Turow once again proves that there is more substance in a single page of one of his novels than in the entire works of John Grisham or any other author in the legal thriller genre. In this latest, the mother of a probation officer is shot near a gang-infested housing project, provoking charges that her son orchestrated the killing. The ensuing trial reunites a group of affluent Sixties activists who knew each other in their student days. The courtroom scenes are energetic and intelligent, and Turow never resorts to playing good guys vs. bad guys. Nor does he subject his characters to tearful, revelatory testimony while on the stand. His dialog is snappy and believableaside from some awkwardly rendered sections featuring the leader of an urban street gangand his insight into his characters' petty motivations and misplaced love is dead on. All public libraries should have a copy of this fine novel.Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

The undisputed king of contemporary legal intrigue (Pleading Guilty, 1993, etc.) offers a sumptuous triple-decker tracing the tangled roots of an apparently accidental murder back 25 years.

The present-day story begins with the death of inoffensive June Eddgar, victim of a daybreak drive-by shooting. Investigating officers, who waste no time turning eyewitness Ordell Trent, a.k.a. Hardcore, figure the dead woman, who'd been driving a car belonging to her husband, State Senator Loyell Eddgar, was killed in error for him, and on the orders of Eddgar's son Nile, Hardcore's probation officer, whose reasons for ordering his father's execution Kindle County prosecutors are only too eager to unfold to Judge Sonia Klonsky. But Sonny Klonsky brings her own baggage to the case. Back in her college days, her political convictions and her hell-raising social life had brought her together with June Eddgar, unofficial den mother to campus radicals; Nile's baby-sitter Seth Weissman, who shared Sonny's bed and board; and Hobie Tuttle, the D.C. lawyer who's now defending Nile. As the case against Nile lurches forward—replete with all the courtroom razzle-dazzle you'd expect from Turow, and the revelations of character and milieu you wouldn't expect from anyone else—Sonny's voice increasingly yields to Seth's. Determined to avoid the draft by fleeing to Canada, and devoutly (if symbolically) attached to the cause of Cleveland Marsh, a jailed Black Panther whose bail he wishes he could post, he plots to combine his two goals by faking his own kidnapping—a plot that spirals out of control with fatal consequences for himself, his parents, and, yes, the Eddgar family.

Beneath the layers of deep legal deviousness, Turow never lets you forget that his characters lived and loved before they ever got dragged into court, and that they have lives to go back to after the final gavel comes down.