Turow’s latest legal novel lets readers be the judge

IT’S easy to take Scott Turow for granted. It seems as if a new generation of crime writers -- Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Michael Connelly -- has emerged since Turow’s explosive debut novel “Presumed Innocent” was published in 1987. He’s just gone about writing his bestsellers without much fuss. Critics don’t pay much attention to the old hands when new blood makes for sexier copy.

But Turow remains a master of the legal procedural. This latest book, “Limitations,” is something new for him. It began as a commission from the New York Times Magazine to write a serial novel, which appeared earlier this year. Turow has added a little narrative padding to stretch the story to book length, but the tale itself is as tightly wound as it was in the magazine.

It’s a smallish book for Turow, and so the canvas is small, as well. We are in familiar territory: Kindle County, the Midwestern setting Turow uses that is a thinly veiled stand-in for Chicago. The protagonist, George Mason, is an appellate court judge with a stellar legal bloodline. His work is pleasantly benumbing, not as thrilling certainly as in his previous incarnation as a criminal court judge, but for an aging legal hand who still loves to adjudicate, it’s not a bad gig.

Like the characters in a few of Turow’s previous novels (Mack Malloy from “Pleading Guilty” comes to mind), Mason carries his world weariness like a yoke, and his deeply buried secrets are creeping up to haunt him.

When the story begins, Mason (who first appeared in “Personal Injuries”) has to rule on an unusual gang-rape case. Although the incident occurred many years ago, the victim never came forward to press charges. But when a videotape of the rape is introduced as potential evidence, Mason must decide whether the statute of limitations applies to the case -- in other words, whether it should be tried.

There are other complications, of course. Mason’s wife, Patrice, is suffering from cancer, and as the book begins, she is in the hospital undergoing an unusually brutal form of radiation therapy. Mason is suffering from his own malaise, but it’s spiritual in nature. It turns out that Mason himself was a perpetrator in a similar rape incident when he was a pre-law college student.

The case before Mason has stirred up the old ghosts, and now he is faced with a moral dilemma: Can he pass judgment on others when he might be guilty of something similar? There’s another complication, as well; Mason is getting threatening e-mails from a mystery stalker, cryptic warnings to watch his back.

It’s a nifty conceit. In 200 pages, Turow forces us to grapple with the notion of crime and redemption, a little Dostoevsky-lite to go with our potboiler mystery. Questions abound. Is rehabilitation possible without the attendant punishment? What constitutes criminal intent, anyway? Mostly, Turow wants us to think hard about the statute of limitations and its concept of a time limit for adjudicating crimes.

All is ambiguous in Turow’s world. His criminals have become productive members of society, or so it seems. Meanwhile, Mason is dealing with the suppression of his own crime, and now he’s in danger of compromising his integrity. Turow wants us to tease it all out for ourselves, to determine whether time absolves old wrongs.

It takes considerable skill to cast an empathetic eye on heroes and villains alike, and Turow is good at it. He deftly avoids cliche and broad, TV-drama strokes for his cast of characters. Turow, who still practices law, knows how smart lawyers think, and “Limitations,” like his previous seven novels, is a primer on the legal mind at work.

Here is Turow on how veteran judges like Mason decide cases: “Most of the time, no matter what your political or philosophical stripes, whether you like the law or not, you find that your decision feels preordained. Even when you can imagine a route to another result, loyalty to the institution of the law, and more particularly to other judges, good women and men who’ve sat where you sit and who’ve done their level best to decide similar cases, requires you to follow the same paths they’ve trod.” The world might be a better place if all judges abided by this rule.

If there’s a flaw, it’s in the climax, which is highly unsatisfying. Turow sets us up for something big, but the story sort of trails off and tidily closes up. Things proceed quite briskly until then, however, and the moral questions that Turow posits are mercifully not resolved as neatly. We’re left to work them out for ourselves long after we’ve put the book down for the last time.

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Marc Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution.”