Scott Turow’s Time Has Come : Books: After only three days in the bookstores, the latest effort from the author of “Presumed Innocent” tops the best-seller list.

At a party celebrating the publication of his new novel, “The Burden of Proof,” in New York City late last week, best-selling author Scott Turow said it best when he told his publisher: “Leaving aside the birth of my children, this has probably been the best week of my life.”

Today, the Chicago attorney-novelist, whose 1987 first novel, “Presumed Innocent,” was a publishing phenomenon, joined the ranks of Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger and Alex Haley by becoming the 92nd writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine.

Turow’s first glimpse of the Time cover came during an interview on the “Today” show when host Bryant Gumbel handed him a copy still hot off the press.

“That truly blew me away,” said Turow. “I suffer my defeats and I have a hard time enjoying my triumphs, but I’ll tell you that one I really enjoyed.”

On Wednesday, Turow learned that “The Burden of Proof,” after three days in bookstores, will be ranked No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list next Sunday.

And on Thursday, “Entertainment Tonight” taped the author “gazing in wonder” at a huge electronic billboard in Times Square advertising “The Burden of Proof,” complete with a computerized picture of the author.

“It’s very heady stuff, there’s no way around it,” said Turow, 41, recalling the time when his fondest dream was simply to hold in his hands a published novel he had written.

“I don’t know how to adjust, frankly, to any of this stuff,” said Turow, a former assistant United States attorney who is now a partner in a large Chicago law firm. “A big part of me just wants to go home, sort of grab my kids and go back to work and do what I know best.”

Adding to his euphoria last week was the fact that Turow had just returned from his 20-year reunion at Amherst College, where he began writing “seriously” before moving on to Stanford and Harvard Law School.

“These are people who have known me forever and can enjoy my success with me and who have, in each instance, considerable success of their own,” he said. “So it was a pretty spectacular week, on top of which my wife was with me part of the time and got to enjoy it with me.”

Speaking by phone from his New York City hotel room Friday morning, Turow was winding up the first week of a three-week publicity tour that will take him to San Francisco today and Los Angeles Wednesday. On Thursday, he’ll speak at The Times Orange County Edition’s annual Book and Author Luncheon in Costa Mesa.

The most memorable week in Turow’s life did not start out that way.

The New York Times Book Review panned “The Burden of Proof,” summing up with, “Scott Turow can do better, as he’s already shown. And undoubtedly will again.”

And what was Turow’s reaction to the review? “It’s just terrible, horrible. It’s like being trapped in a landslide,” he said.

But Turow was not too discouraged by that “one rotten review.” His spirits were lifted by “extremely generous” reviews in the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, which began with, “Scott Turow’s second novel proves beyond any reasonable doubt that his hugely successful first was no fluke.”

Observes Turow, the man whom Time magazine dubbed the Bard of the Litigious Age: “The fact of the matter is you can’t connect with every reader and, in some ways, when you have a success the size of ‘Presumed Innocent,’ you’re going to start behind the eight ball with some reviewers.”

The protagonist of “The Burden of Proof” will be familiar to readers of Turow’s blockbuster first novel, which was on the New York Times best-seller list 44 weeks and sold 712,000 hardcover copies and 4.3 million paperback copies in this country.

He’s Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, the brilliant Midwestern attorney who masterminded the defense of Rusty Sabich, the prosecutor wrongfully accused of murdering a colleague in “Presumed Innocent.”

Turow fans will be able to refresh their memories of that story when the movie version of “Presumed Innocent,” directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Harrison Ford as Sabich, premieres in late July.

In “The Burden of Proof,” we pick up with Stern three years later. Returning home from a business trip, the middle-aged attorney discovers that Clara, his wife of 31 years, has committed suicide. She left only a four-word note: “Can you forgive me?”

Why Clara killed herself is just one of the mysteries the beleaguered Stern must unravel. Another is why the Justice Department is investigating his brother-in-law, Dixon Hartnell, the wealthy, womanizing owner of a commodities futures brokerage.

Turow said the Sandy Stern of “The Burden of Proof” is based partly on his uncle, a doctor who lived in Los Angeles.

“I was always fascinated by his life and in his later years he found himself alone, unmarried and, I think, not entirely pleased with the way his life had gone,” said Turow. “I always wanted to write a book about a man like that who was starting again.”

While writing “Presumed Innocent,” Turow said he also had become fascinated with Stern.

“He didn’t seem to be an oddball sort of novelistic creation,” he said. “He seems to have integrity as a character . . . and I was very curious: Here’s this Argentine Jew--courtly, old world, formal and careful about the way he presents himself. What goes on inside this guy?”

In 1986, while taking out the trash, Turow recalled, “I got this lightning bolt: I can put these things (Stern and his thoughts about his uncle) together.”

“I can’t give a better example about how my creative process works than that story,” Turow said, adding that it is a matter of combining “opportunities and long-term interests.”

Turow began the writing of “The Burden of Proof” while he was on his promotional tour for “Presumed Innocent” in 1987. He remembers working on the second chapter on a rented lap-top computer in an Anaheim hotel room one weekend while his newborn daughter was napping and his wife, Annette, and two older children were at Disneyland.

Turow’s regular writing schedule is less haphazard.

He writes mornings at home in his study, which is equipped with three phone lines, a computer and a fax machine. He works until the phone starts ringing about 10 o’clock and at noon he takes the train into Chicago for meetings with his colleagues and clients in his office in the Sears Tower.

That all changes if he has to be in court or has morning meetings, said Turow, praising his law-firm partners who, “from the beginning, have been willing to accept the terms of my life and to say, ‘Let’s work this out together.’ ”

Although it’s sometimes difficult juggling two careers, Turow has no intention of giving up his law practice.

Beyond the material practicing law for 12 years has given to him as a novelist, he said, “I need it because of the daily stimulation. It somehow enhances my ability to reflect.”

Besides, “it keeps me sane,” he said, recalling that when he read an advance copy of the negative review in the New York Times Book Review, he was glad he was able to turn his attention to his clients.

While on his book tour, Turow has kept abreast of the three Grand Jury matters and a civil case he’s currently involved in.

On Thursday, between interviews with “Entertainment Tonight” and CBS radio he took time out to work on a brief. It has to do with the rights of outsiders to intervene in Grand Jury proceedings and is, Turow said, “a terrific issue.”

In coming weeks Turow’s visage will become more recognizable across America. His publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, has an initial $750,000 marketing budget to promote its 800,000-copy hardcover first printing of “The Burden of Proof”--both record-breakers for the prestigious but medium-sized publishing house.

Although the paperback rights to the novel reportedly sold for more than $3.2 million, Turow will not disclose his unquestionably substantial income from the novel.

“I really understand people’s curiosity about it,” he said. “I always want to know what football and baseball players make, but it just distracts from the book. Most people don’t talk about how much money they make, and I’m like everybody else.”

Although Turow was looking forward to spending the weekend at home with his family before heading west, he said he doesn’t mind putting up with the demands of a publicity tour.

“My attitude toward this is if you like to cash the checks, then you’ve got to do the work that goes along with it,” he said, adding that he criticizes “those quote unquote serious writers who take the money and don’t want to commune with the public.”

As he sees it, “I am a writer who has self-consciously addressed himself to a broad audience. I want to be read and I want to reach out to that audience.”

Turow said he’s more relaxed about the hoopla surrounding the publication of his second novel than he was the first.

“The last time I was really afraid it was going to destroy me,” he said. He came to realize, however, that “my life isn’t going to change.

“The mistake is to believe that attention is going to somehow transform your internal life. It doesn’t happen. If I hold onto the things that have always mattered to me and the people that have always mattered to me, everything will be fine.”

As for the week that was, he acknowledged, “It’ll be awhile before I get as much of a charge out of anything.”