Reversible Errors

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
The verdict is in: Popular fiction rarely gets any better, or more involving, than Reversible Errors, Scott Turow’s profoundly satisfying legal thriller, which takes on the charged subject of death penalty litigation.

Set in Turow's familiar fictional venue of Kindle County, Illinois, the story concerns a pathetic, hard-luck career criminal named Rommy Gandolph, a.k.a. Squirrel. Convicted of a particularly vicious triple homicide, Rommy is 33 days away from certain execution. When a convicted criminal with terminal cancer comes forward with a story that casts doubt on Rommy's guilt, it soon becomes clear that more than Squirrel's life is at stake. On one side of the legal line stand ambitious deputy prosecutor Muriel Wynn and veteran homicide detective Larry Starczek, former lovers who were responsible for Rommy's original conviction and whose lives seem seem inextricably connected to this case. On the other side stands Arthur Raven, Rommy's plodding, colorless court-appointed defender. His work is complicated by an evolving friendship with Gillian Sullivan, the disgraced judge who presided over Rommy's initial trial. These four figures -- together with a brilliantly delineated gallery of supporting characters -- form the human center of a fiercely contested legal battle that will alter the destinies of everyone involved.

Turow's knack for convoluted plotting, ability to find drama in the most minute points of law, lively, observant prose, and flawless sense of character lift him into a league of his own when it comes to legal fiction. Reversible Errors -- a wonderfully resonant title -- is a account of love and redemption, crime and punishment, the intricacies of the legal system, the high cost of ambition, and the primal importance of our most basic human connections. Bill Sheehan

The New York Times Book Review

What Turow has done, in book after book, is to give us page turners that are also pleasing literary artifacts, mysteries that are also investigations into complicated social questions and complex human emotions.

Bill Blum

No one on the contemporary scene writes better mystery-suspense novels than Scott Turow.
— Los Angeles Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

The sixth novel from bestseller Turow is a big book about little people in big trouble, involving the death penalty (one of the author's real-life legal specialties), procedural foul-ups and a cast of characters who exemplify the adage about good intentions paving the road to hell. Arthur Raven (a middle-aged, undistinguished lawyer taking care of a schizophrenic sister in a suburb of Chicago) lands a career-making case: the 11th-hour appeal of a quasi-retarded death row inmate, Rommy "Squirrel" Gandolph (accused of triple homicide a decade earlier), on new testimony by a terminally ill convict. Muriel Wynn, an ambitious prosecutor, and Larry Starczek, the detective who originally worked the case, are Raven's adversaries. Plot thickener: Wynn and Starczek are engaged in a longstanding, tortuous, off-again, on-again affair (both being unhappily married) that predates the crime, and which may have indirectly influenced the course of the original investigation. Arthur pulls in the original presiding judge from the case, Gillian Sullivan, just emerging from her own prison stretch for bribery (which masks an even darker secret) to assist him on the case, which leads to another tortuous affair on the defense's side. On top of this (Turow is well known for his many-layered narratives) is the dynamic among the criminals themselves: the dying con may be covering up for his wayward nephew, further muddying the legal waters. The first part of the book, which flips back and forth between the original investigation (1991) and the new trial (2001), is structurally the most demanding, but it is vital to the way in which Turow makes Rommy's case (as well as Arthur's and Muriel's). No character in this novel is entirely likable; all seek to undo some past wrong, with results that get progressively worse. Turow fans should not be disappointed; nor should his publisher.

Library Journal

Turow (Personal Injuries) has said that once he acquired a computer, he stopped developing stories in a linear fashion. His latest novel not only bears out that statement but provides a good example of using a nonlinear structure to build suspense and develop characters. Kindle County defense attorney Arthur Raven is appointed by the court to look into a case that was tried more than a decade ago. In the process, he is forced to revisit not only his client's past but his own. To portray the ever-shifting balance of legal issues in the case in tandem with changes in the characters' emotional and philosophical states during the intervening years, Turow moves skillfully between past and present, revealing tidbits of fact, circumstance, and motive as he goes and leaving it up to the reader not only to construct the story's linear progression but to understand the significance of the book's title as both a legal entity within its plot and a personal reality for its characters. Turow's work once again extends beyond the genre he helped create. Highly recommended.-Nancy McNicol, Whitneyville Branch Lib., Hamden, CT Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A final appeal from Death Row reopens a decade-old murder case as the world's preeminent legal novelist (Personal Injuries, 1999, etc.) proves once again why his grasp of the moral dimensions of legal problems sets the gold standard for the genre. The cops in Turow's home turf of Kindle County had no trouble solving the Fourth of July Massacre ten years ago because Romeo Gandolph "confessed to everybody but the Daily Planet," as his court-appointed appellate attorney Arthur Raven tells his junior associate Pamela Towns. But now, weeks from execution, Rommy's changed his story. Instead of pleading insanity to the shooting of popular restaurant owner Gus Leonidis and two customers, the acknowledged thief and fence suddenly insists he didn't do it. And improbable, nearly imperceptible cracks begin to appear in the mountain of evidence that aggressive prosecutor Muriel Wynn and her lover Larry Starczek, the lead detective on the case, amassed against Rommy. The DA's office, eager to keep their files tidy, never questioned key witnesses, came up with questionable forensics of one of the victims, and overlooked the possibility that Rommy may already have been in custody when the gun went off. This time around, as Arthur realizes, there's another defendant besides Rommy: Gillian Sullivan, the judge who found him guilty and sentenced him to death before her own conviction and sentence for bribery. Working with Gillian's unwilling help, Arthur manages to get a confession from a long-unsuspected source. Fans of Turow, however, will see this second confession as no more reliable than the first-except as a device to strip away still more layers of deception from troubled characters desperate to breakthe fragile alliances they were desperate to form. No car chases, explosions, threats against the detective, movie-star locations, or gourmet meals: just a deeply satisfying novel about deeply human people who just happen to be victims, schemers, counselors-at-law, or all three at once.