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Overview
Robbie Feaver pronounced "favor" is a successful personal injury lawyer with a burgeoning practice, a way with the ladies, and a beautiful wife whom he loves dying of an irreversible illness. He also has a secret bank account where he occasionally deposits funds that make their way into the pockets of the judges who decide Robbie's cases.. "Robbie is apprehended, and, in exchange for leniency, agrees to "wear a wire" as he continues to try to fix decisions. The FBI agent assigned to supervise him goes by the alias of Evon Miller. She is lonely, uncomfortable in her skin, and impervious to Robbie's charms. And she carries secrets of her own.. "As the law tightens its net, Robbie's and Evon's stories converge.Synopsis
To Robbie Feaver the law is all about making a play-to a client, a jury, or a judge. But when the flashy, womanizing, multimillion-dollar personal injury lawyer is caught offering bribes, he's forced to wear a wire. Even as the besieged attorney looks after his ailing wife, Feaver must also make tapes that will hurl his friends, his enemies, his city, and a particular FBI undercover agent into a crisis of conscience and law. Now Robbie Feaver is making the play of his life.
Salon - Jonathan Groner
Lawyer-turned-writer Scott Turow caught the elusive bubble of fame in 1987 with the publication of Presumed Innocent, an intense, taut mystery narrated by a first-person, morally ambiguous attorney. Set in fictional Kindle County, clearly a stand-in for Cook County (where Turow still practices law), that novel practically invented the late 20th century genre of the legal thriller. (John Grisham gets some credit as well, but Grisham -- an earnest, plodding moralist with an acute feel for the American hatred of large law firms and corporations -- has inspired fewer imitators.) After two middling follow-ups, The Burden of Proof (1990) and Pleading Guilty (1993), Turow again fulfilled his potential with The Laws of Our Fathers (1996), a thriller that evoked the streets and straits of the urban ghetto with a darkness that few novelists from outside the ghetto would even attempt.
Now, with Personal Injuries, again set in his favorite county of the imagination, Turow turns to a new topic: the casual corruption that can infect a big city's court system. The novel marks a watershed for Turow: All the legal twists and turns are still there, but this time the author focuses his fullest attention on character, scene and subplot. His Kindle County is an urban mélange of venal court clerks, self-righteous prosecutors, corrupt cops and judges who sit on the bench only because they once knew the right politician. It's an almost Dickensian fictional world -- and indeed, on his Web site Turow calls Dickens a "profound influence" who "created robust characters without giving up his principal mission as a storyteller." (His other major influence, he says, is fellow urban chronicler and Chicagoan Saul Bellow.)
Into this morally compromised environment Turow drops Robbie Feaver, a personal-injury lawyer who has been bribing judges for years. The name is pronounced as in "Do me a favor," Feaver quickly tells us, and that phrase just about sums up his legal career. Cornered at last by prosecutors and the FBI, who persuade him that his only way of avoiding prison is to wear a wire, Feaver makes his tortuous way through a labyrinth of corruption as he and the feds try to trap the elusive leader of the bribery ring. An inveterate womanizer, a nonstop wisecracker and a man with plenty in his past to hide, Feaver still retains his unshakable sense of loyalty and his own style of fidelity to his wife, Lorraine, who is slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease.
The novel intertwines three tales: of Robbie's adventures as an undercover agent in an extremely elaborate sting; of FBI agent Evon Miller's transformation after she is assigned to keep an eye on him; and of Lorraine's slow, sad deterioration. As the three strands come together toward the end, each character deepens and grows in humanity.
The book doesn't pack much mystery, though. Once the main action is under way and Feaver, wired for sight and sound, has set out among the judges and the courtroom lackeys, there are few surprises. But Personal Injuries succeeds as a long look at a world where greed, sloth and lust hold sway despite the efforts of some good men and women.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewMore than any other writer — and that includes John Grisham — Scott Turow is responsible for the recent popular resurgence of the legal thriller. His 1987 bestseller, Presumed Innocent, is a stylish, hugely assured courtroom drama that set a new standard for the form and opened the door to an endless procession of lawyers-turned-writers, most of them considerably less gifted than Turow.
In the 12 years since, Turow's own career has been marked by his admirable refusal to replicate that initial success. His four subsequent novels, the latest of which is Personal Injuries, have all been radically different from one another; their only common denominator is the author's abiding interest in depicting the lives of the people who serve — and represent — the law.
Personal Injuries is set in Turow's by-now familiar fictional venue, Kindle County. Its narrator is George Mason, a well-bred, upper-crust defense attorney who, as the novel opens, has just taken on a volatile new client: Robbie Feaver, a slick, fast-talking lawyer who specializes in personal injuries litigation and who now faces indictment for tax evasion and bribery. Given the choice of cooperating with the government or spending several years in prison, Robbie becomes a confidential informant for U.S. Attorney Stan Sennett and agrees to wear a wire to all future meetings with the judges he has paid off, as well as with their various intermediaries and bagmen.
Robbie thus becomes the focal point of a protracted sting operation known as Project Petros, which forms the dramatic centerofthis beautifully constructed story of betrayal, personal responsibility, and difficult — sometimes impossible — choices. During a period of six months, Robbie and his new masters gradually gather evidence of judicial malfeasance, slowly making their way toward the elusive figure who is the ultimate target of Project Petros: Brendan Tuohey, the corrupt former cop who is now the corrupt presiding judge of the Common Law Claims Division of Kindle County, and who has spent the bulk of his career manipulating the law for his own personal profit.
In spite of the considerable excitement that the slowly unfolding sting operation provides, Personal Injuries is primarily a novel of character and is largely concerned with demonstrating the ways in which very different people change, grow, and reveal themselves under the stress of traumatic events. Through the course of the novel, Turow brings to vivid life an entire gallery of characters, among them the narrator, George Mason, who ends up learning as much about himself and his own personal limits as he does about his client, and Stan Sennett, the United States attorney who orchestrates Petros, and whose implacable, sometimes inhuman, pursuit of justice gives him an ironic resemblance to the very people he is determined to destroy.
But Personal Injuries draws its greatest strength from Turow's empathetic presentation of his two central characters: Robbie Feaver, the hapless hustler caught up in Stan Sennett's schemes, and Evon Miller, the pseudonymous FBI agent assigned to guard him. Evon is a former Olympic athlete who has never — outside of her brief career in sports — felt at home in the world. Lonely, susceptible to powerful attacks of unfocused longing, and dominated by sexual confusion and a sense of disconnection from the human mainstream, she reaches a believable and moving accommodation with herself during the course of her involvement with Robbie Feaver and his wildly disordered life.
Robbie, by contrast, is a flashy, philandering con man who has built his life on a series of lies and false foundations. But he is also a man capable of kindness, loyalty, and extraordinary fortitude. It's impossible not to be appalled by him at times, and it's equally impossible not to admire his stoic acceptance of a devastating series of losses, both personal and professional. His legal and financial problems, staggering as they are, are overwhelmed by the central fact of his daily life: His wife, Rainey, is being eaten alive by the final stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Turow's unsparing description of the effects of ALS on both its victims and their families is one of the book's most memorable and painful elements.
In the end, it is Robbie — whose flawed humanity remains intact in the face of almost unendurable pressures — who delivers the novel's most fundamental message: Everyone hurts, to some degree. Everyone is in pain. And the only answer, as Robbie tells Evon, is to "stick with each other, do for each other, and build up the world. Because misery does love company, and another soul's comfort is the only balm for the wounds."
This deceptively simple vision permeates the narrative and accounts for a great deal of its considerable emotional force. Personal Injuries may be David Shenk's most accomplished novel to date, and it is certainly his most moving. It is the work of a man who is both a master of the legal thriller and a natural-born novelist. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
—Bill Sheehan
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is currently working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.
Newsweek
Every page of this tale about a sting operation bears the stamp of a born storyteller.Scott Tobias
Personal Injuries has enough well-calibrated turns to fill a stack of best-selling also-rans. Though Turow holds the dubious distinction of being the first in a long line of attorneys to exploit their profession for literary intrigue, he still proves himself without peer.— The Onion A.V. Club
Jonathan Groner
Lawyer-turned-writer Scott Turow caught the elusive bubble of fame in 1987 with the publication of Presumed Innocent, an intense, taut mystery narrated by a first-person, morally ambiguous attorney. Set in fictional Kindle County, clearly a stand-in for Cook County (where Turow still practices law), that novel practically invented the late 20th century genre of the legal thriller. (John Grisham gets some credit as well, but Grisham -- an earnest, plodding moralist with an acute feel for the American hatred of large law firms and corporations -- has inspired fewer imitators.) After two middling follow-ups, The Burden of Proof (1990) and Pleading Guilty (1993), Turow again fulfilled his potential with The Laws of Our Fathers (1996), a thriller that evoked the streets and straits of the urban ghetto with a darkness that few novelists from outside the ghetto would even attempt.
Now, with Personal Injuries, again set in his favorite county of the imagination, Turow turns to a new topic: the casual corruption that can infect a big city's court system. The novel marks a watershed for Turow: All the legal twists and turns are still there, but this time the author focuses his fullest attention on character, scene and subplot. His Kindle County is an urban mélange of venal court clerks, self-righteous prosecutors, corrupt cops and judges who sit on the bench only because they once knew the right politician. It's an almost Dickensian fictional world -- and indeed, on his Web site Turow calls Dickens a "profound influence" who "created robust characters without giving up his principal mission as a storyteller." (His other major influence, he says, is fellow urban chronicler and Chicagoan Saul Bellow.)
Into this morally compromised environment Turow drops Robbie Feaver, a personal-injury lawyer who has been bribing judges for years. The name is pronounced as in "Do me a favor," Feaver quickly tells us, and that phrase just about sums up his legal career. Cornered at last by prosecutors and the FBI, who persuade him that his only way of avoiding prison is to wear a wire, Feaver makes his tortuous way through a labyrinth of corruption as he and the feds try to trap the elusive leader of the bribery ring. An inveterate womanizer, a nonstop wisecracker and a man with plenty in his past to hide, Feaver still retains his unshakable sense of loyalty and his own style of fidelity to his wife, Lorraine, who is slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's disease.
The novel intertwines three tales: of Robbie's adventures as an undercover agent in an extremely elaborate sting; of FBI agent Evon Miller's transformation after she is assigned to keep an eye on him; and of Lorraine's slow, sad deterioration. As the three strands come together toward the end, each character deepens and grows in humanity.
The book doesn't pack much mystery, though. Once the main action is under way and Feaver, wired for sight and sound, has set out among the judges and the courtroom lackeys, there are few surprises. But Personal Injuries succeeds as a long look at a world where greed, sloth and lust hold sway despite the efforts of some good men and women.
— Salon
Publishers Weekly
Unlike most of his fellow lawyer-novelists, Turow has always been more interested in character than plot, and in Robbie Feaver, a lawyer on the make who ends up fighting for his life, he has created his richest and most compelling figure yet. For years, Robbie has been paying off judges and squirreling away part of the riches he earns as a highly successful trial lawyer. When the IRS happens upon the money trail, and a top prosecutor leans on him to turn state's evidence and finger some of the corrupt justices, Robbie calls on George Mason, veteran Kindle County lawyer, to represent him and win the best deal he can. A complicating element in the case is Evon Miller, Mormon-born FBI agent in deep undercover, who is assigned to watch Feaver and finds herself, against her better inclinations, drawn to him--for Feaver is a character of almost Shakespearean contradictions. A charming, brash womanizer who nevertheless shows superhuman reserves of love and patience to his dying wife at home, he is always several jumps ahead of the prosecutors, the FBI and the reader, winning sympathy, even admiration, where there should be none. This patient account is fascinatingly detailed in the ways of the law and the justice system, of how Robbie zeroes in on the biggest target of all, only to be trumped at the last moment. It is also a deeply understanding look, in its portrait of Evon, of the motives that drive a solitary woman into police work Thomas Harris's Clarice seems shallow by comparison. There are some remarkable narrative strategies--Turow deftly alternates a first-person and omniscient-author point of view, for example--but readers will not be concerned with technical details, only with the rare revelation of a paradoxical personality so compelling he makes the very adroit plot almost superfluous. Oct. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Think of a stereotypical sleazy lawyer, and you have Robbie Feaver. Overdressed, too loud, a compulsive womanizer without an honest bone in his body, Robbie has also been caught bribing judges and has agreed to wear a wire to implicate his associates. Think of an upright prosecuting attorney and you find Stan Sennett, humorless, brilliant, driven. Think of a female FBI agent, and, voil , meet Evon Miller, an Olympic athlete, a straight arrow whose job comes above all else. If you think you know these people, you don't know best-selling author Turow, among the best in the business at pulling the rug out from under your expectations. Add actor Joe Mantegna, an inspired choice as reader, and you have as good an audiobook as will be released this year. The abridgment shifts the book's focus from an extended character study, contrasting Feaver and Sennett, to a more plot-driven story that holds up nearly as well. If some of Turow's fine prose is sacrificed to brevity there is still plenty left here to recommend highly.--John Hiett, Iowa City P.L. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\Talk Magazine
Scott Turow is to courtroom literature what Harrison Ford is to action-adventures: the class of the field. Thirteen years and four novels after he left the U.S. Attorney's office, he has written a novel based on his work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney with Operation Greylord, a six year federal undercover operation that plumbed Chicago's courts for corrupt judges, lawyers, and cops...Taking a writer's liberties,he has re-created the entire Greylord landscape in Personal Injuries and produced perhaps his best book.Talk Magazine's 10 Best Books of November
Newsweek
Every page of this tale about a sting operation bears the stamp of a born storyteller.Tom DeHaven
Scott Turow presents the best book of his career with Personal Injuries a riveting, impeccably crafted legal thriller...Legal Fiction has turned depressingly formulaic and melodramatic lately, but Scott Turow's just gets richer and smarter. Funnier, too. Personal Injuries is the best work of his career.Entertainment Weekly
Deirdre Donahue
Everything Scott Turow writes breathes with intelligence, acute observation and wisdom. And his new novel, Personal Injuries, offers an extraordinary look at the complicated realities of running an undercover operation designed to ensnare corrupt judges.— USA Today