All too human justice

Oh what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practise to deceive! -- Sir Walter Scott

But that’s the point, isn’t it? And Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander is there to unravel it sooner or later in “Firewall.” But Kurt Wallander is getting on, and the life that he must cope with fits him as well as a suit cut for a larger man. He has been diagnosed with diabetes, his energy is low, he is world-weary, sick of senseless creatures who beat on each other in an arbitrary world. He forgets his cell phone, or carries it turned off; he forgets his wallet on his desk, his notepad, his glasses and, for all we know, his false teeth as well; he drives jerkily and too fast; he’s given to sudden rages. Around him society has turned brittle, the young opaque, adults perplexed, friends fickle, relationships precarious, colleagues undependable, existence lonesome and unmoored. To soothe his loneliness, he even sends an ad to the local newspaper’s personals section, hoping to find companionship (and sex).

We are, as ever, in Ystad, in southern Sweden. Two girls brutally murder a taxi driver. “What’s happened to the world?” “I don’t know.” “They’re just young girls.” “I know, I know. And they have no remorse at all.” One of the girls walks out of police custody and vanishes; the other accuses Wallander of unprovoked aggression. Then, a man falls dead beside an ATM; a blackout cuts power to Ystad and a large area around it; a corpse found at the malfunctioning power substation turns out to be that of the girl who walked off; and the corpse of the man at the ATM disappears from the morgue. Clearly, security in Swedish morgues, police and power stations leaves something to be desired. Meanwhile, “the Swedish justice system is degenerating into a crumbling warehouse of unsolved cases.”

Not to worry. The mystery turns out to be connected to electronics and computers: what they can do and undo, what can be done with them, what can be done to them. The police investigation turns into long-range hacking and breaching of codes and firewalls; the crucial sleuths will be techies, geeks and nerds. So Wallander was right: Perhaps it’s time to quit. But not while the fate of society hangs in the balance. Only inches from failure, he will nonetheless solve the case, or preside over its solution to keep the soft underbelly of our society from frying. And, just to reassure him (and his faithful addicts), his semi-estranged daughter, Linda, decides to follow in his footsteps and become a policewoman. But unraveling a tangle leaves one at an obtuse angle.

And why shouldn’t attorneys write novels not just of procedure and suspense, but of stylish sleuthing through sentiment, emotions, intimacies, human weakness and making the best of not-quite-getting what you had hoped to get? Scott Turow’s latest, “Reversible Errors,” is about ambition, affection, attraction, hope, anger and dissembling; about two love affairs blundering toward resolution; and about the power of law, which, at its drabbest, is about words on a page and tricks of a trade, but also about life and death. In the end, law saves lives or ruins them, or ends them. Or perhaps people do.

Turow’s people are as slippery and mutable as the law in practice. Their reasons are often unreasonable. Their values are fungible. Their memories are fallible or slovenly or sly. Their stories keep changing: the tales they tell to police, to their lawyers, to their lovers, to their friends, to themselves. And all of this matters because a poor soul awaiting execution for a triple murder committed long ago has decided to recant the confession on which his sentence was based. As his court-appointed defenders follow the trail of evidence and turn up a great deal more than anyone suspected, the condemned man’s guilt becomes less clear, but each alternative explanation that might exculpate him adds to the murkiness of the case. The more testimony, new evidence, confessions and allegations the investigators gather, the more perplexing the conundrums they face. The more vics, wits and possible perps talk, the greater their confusion, and the reader’s.

Turow has constructed a mazy, tortuous tale, as easy to misread as it is to read. In legal parlance, a reversible error is a mistake so significant that an appellate court must set aside the judgment that was based on it. But errors may prove more reversible in court than they are in life. Crooks and criminals may yet be pardoned, saved. Can error-prone, self-destructive, unimpeachable adults hope for as much?