The Sting

“This is a lawyer’s story, the kind attorneys like to hear and tell,” states the narrator of this fifth novel by Scott Turow, the Chicago lawyer whose richly written stories of judicial intrigue are the gold standard by which such books have been judged for the last dozen years.

Turow set that standard, for himself and the many legal fiction writers who came in his wake, with his first novel, “Presumed Innocent.” Now, with “Personal Injuries,” a compelling and convincing account of a long-term government-run sting operation, the author has fashioned his most satisfying and absorbing book since that landmark 1987 debut.

Orchestrated to snare bribe-taking judges, the sting--with all the hidden mikes and cameras, incriminating money drops, anxiously eavesdropping agents, mounting paranoia and ambiguous threats--unfolds with an authenticity no doubt born of personal experience; as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1980s, Turow took part in a sting aimed at corruption in the Illinois judiciary.

But it’s the individuals involved in “Operation Petros” (named for its mastermind’s uncle, an immigrant “legally” robbed of his life’s savings because, as he said, “I can’t afford to buy a judge”) who make the sting’s outcome of urgent interest to the reader.

George Mason, a criminal defense lawyer practicing in Turow’s recurring fictional terrain, Kindle County, is the book’s narrator. Mason is drawn into the plot by a new client, Robbie Feaver, a high-flying personal injury lawyer whose tax dodges put him at the mercy of the U.S. attorney. Despite knowing that “there was no end to the way clients could disappoint you,” Mason will find Feaver to be “an eternal beacon of need, like those dead stars which, even imploded, continue emitting a radio signal through space.” But Feaver’s clinging to his lawyer is understandable. “It’s a complicated business,” Mason knows, “being somebody’s only hope.”

Making things more complicated for Mason, his client has become an informant for U.S. Atty. Stan Sennett, “one of those dark, driven little men who turn up so often in the law,” sometime friend, always rival to whom Mason has long been tied “by a mutual admiration that bordered on envy.” Sennett, with an in-court manner “humorless as a hatchet blade” and an idealistic intensity that makes it seem “his entire world was often at stake in a case,” uses this mutual admiration to get Mason more involved in Operation Petros. As Mason notes: “I eventually sank to my ankles in the familiar bog of compromise where defense lawyers dwell.” The narrator’s mordant eye observes the videotaped crimes, acts that “held the fierce primal attraction of any elemental wrong.”

Feaver, the soon enthusiastic star player of Sennett’s Operation Petros, is a frustrated actor who uses the Stanislavsky method to prepare for “scenes” with those he would incriminate. (Feaver, most sincere when he’s pretending, says of life in all its aspects: “It’s a play.”) In time, his handlers learn that Feaver’s perpetual role-playing is more akin to pathological lying and that he has secrets even the government hasn’t discovered.

Brought in to help “run” Feaver, under the guise of his new paralegal, is FBI agent Evon Miller, who also keeps crucial personal matters, including her real name, under cover.

These participants develop a contagious group esprit in their days and months together, as they grow from cliched stereotypes into complex individuals struggling to deal with urges, obligations and realities--a wife dying excruciatingly of ALS, the urge to save oneself versus the wish to protect a friend--that do not fit neatly into the round holes proffered by courts of law and public opinion.

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As hard to peg as anyone is Feaver, who can’t even be straight about how he pronounces his last name. The crucible of Operation Petros grinds Feaver (and Miller, and Mason, and Sennett) down to some essence of being where he learns precisely what he’ll do (and won’t do) in service to duty, friendship, love. In this beautifully realized book--a book, one might say, Turow was born to write--characters in opposition can evoke almost equal reader sympathy. And though we may not always like their actions, we never doubt their credibility.

Written in a flowing prose by turns reflective and riveting, dancing with vivid scenes and indelible moments, “Private Injuries” is finally as much about human attempts at love as it is about the enforcement of law. And in love, as with law, limited success is not necessarily failure. As the narrator of this splendid book encourages and consoles himself, and us: “Doing less good than you’d want doesn’t mean you’re doing no good at all.”