Scott Turow

Scott Turow's new book is Innocent, the sequel to the bestselling Presumed Innocent.

From his Q & A with Sarah Weinman at The Barnes & Noble Review:

[note: spoiler alert--the interview gives away what happens in the book]

Sarah Weinman: Unlike Presumed Innocent, which is told exclusively from Rusty's first-person point of view, Innocent features four separate perspectives, belonging respectively to Rusty, his now-grown son (and budding law professor) Nat, Tommy Molto, and Rusty's senior law clerk, Anna Vostic. Why did this story need multiple angles?

Scott Turow: If a book is going well, there is always a character who kind of resonates with it. I don't think that when I started writing Innocent I had the idea of writing from Tommy's point of view. But I got up one morning and tried it, because I had an inkling that maybe it would be good to show the investigation of Barbara's death in parallel with what had gone on in Rusty's life a year before. With respect to Nat, I thought he was, in some ways, the most interesting character in the book, because there's a tremendous moral uncertainty about his father. The whole story depends on Nat's willful blindness to certain facts. I'm not sure that could be credible to a reader unless you enter his point of view. I don't think the mechanical considerations were as important to me as the fact of his position being represented. Once I had opened up the perspectives beyond Rusty, I sort of felt obliged to get into Anna's, because I don't think she can be as fully accepted as a character unless you really see how she understands herself.

SW: Anna struck me as an enigma, and I thought she would remain that way throughout the entire book. But all of a sudden, fairly deep into Innocent, she gets her own point of view. On one hand it elicited sympathy, but from a narrative standpoint it was surprising you waited so long to utilize it. Did you consider introducing her perspective earlier, in order to allow the reader to better understand her troubling, important decisions?

ST: The short answer is...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue