In legal jargon, “Reversible Errors” are not mistakes that can be undone by the perpetrators. Rather, they are mistakes made by a trial judge that render the verdict “reversible,” or capable of being overturned, by an appeals court.
But several characters in Scott Turow’s novel have made mistakes in their past lives that they hope to undo. Those readers who are familiar with Turow should not be surprised that most of the mistakes the characters perceive are sexual.
The main plot line involves Rommy “Squirrel” Gandolph, a mentally retarded man who has been on death row 10 years for a triple murder in a restaurant in the Turow-created Kindle County. The evidence against him seems overwhelming. But Gandolph’s newly court-appointed defense attorney, Arthur Raven, believes that there are likely grounds for having the death sentence overturned. The court-appointed defender’s job doesn’t pay much, but Raven has dreams that if Raven is released, a wrongful-imprisonment suit against the district attorney’s office will make both him and Gandolph rich.
Raven decides to talk to the trial judge: Gillian Sullivan, herself recently released from prison after having been disbarred and convicted of taking bribes. Sullivan was not convicted of taking a bribe in Gandolph’s case, so her disgrace would have no bearing on the appeal. What might have a bearing, however, is that Sullivan was a drug addict, taking bribes in order to support her habit (and oerhaps exercising faulty judgment).. Sullivan keeps that potentially damaging fact from Raven — a special complication, since Raven and Sullivan are falling in love.
Raven and Sullivan have both believed that love was not an option for them — the latter because of her past, and the former because he is nearly middle-aged and has been a loser several times in affairs of the heart, and also because he is saddled with the care of an emotionally ill sister. But the new affair gives them both some hope — which may be dashed if the truth comes out.
Muriel Wynn is rethinking her past, too. Wynn is an assistant district attorney, an odds-on prospective candidate for district attorney in the next election (unless the Gandolph case blows up in her face), and the wife of a prominent man. But reopening the Gandolph case puts her in contact with Larry Starczek, a retired detective on Gandolph’s case 10 years before. Wynn and Starczek once had an affair, and in spite of the possible damage to Wynn’s career, they begin a new one.
Starczek has a secret, too, and keeps it from Wynn. The case against Gandolph depended largely on his possession of a bracelet stolen from a murdered woman — but the bracelet was taken from Gandolph by another policeman, on an earlier robbery charge. And Starczek broke the “chain of evidence” by retrieving the bracelet from the other cop.
As if all this wasn’t complication enough, Erno Erdai, a former airport security man now in jail after being convicted in a shooting, and terminally ill with lung cancer, confesses to the murders, explaining that he killed the woman over an affair the two were having and killed the other two people in the restaurant in order to leave no witnesses. He says that he had let Gandolph take the fall earlier in order to keep his nephew, Collins Farwell, an ex-con now “going straight” as a travel agent in Atlanta, from being implicated in Gandolph’s thefts and in Erdai’s own stolen-airline—ticket ring. But Wynn and Starczek believe that Erdai has a more complicated motive.
Still, a new trial seems a certainty — until a former airport employee tells Raven that another man was involved in the ticket scam and had threatened to kill another airport employee, the woman who was in fact the prime murder victim, over it. The other man was Rommy Gandolph, she says.
Such wheels-within-wheels plots are typical of Turow, along with fine writing and some of the most incisive characterization to be found in popular fiction..
Hope to Die
By Lawrence Block
HarperTorch, 2002, $7.99
Matt Scudder, Lawrence Block’s alcoholic hard-boiled private eye, is years out from his addiction, remarried and, having lost his private investigators’ license, is back to “doing favors for friends” instead of officially working.
Hear,, he teams up with a sharp police investigator to reopen a closed case. They do some brilliant detective work, but the criminal they are after — an especially unattractive serial killer — proves to be too “cute” for them and gets away.
Having the criminal outsmart the investigators is an all-right gimmick for a short story or a television episode. But the reader (or viewer) has too much invested for the device to work well in a novel or movie And this is Block’s third straight book in which the bad guy gets away. Block is a masterful stylist and an outstanding plotter, but I shudder to think of reading his next novel.
Reach Cox at ccox@thepilot.com.
