'The Last Trial' review: Another winning verdict for Scott Turow

Scott Turow proves he's still the master of the legal thriller with his newest "The Last Trial." Credit: Jeremy Lawson Photography
THE LAST TRIAL by Scott Turow (Grand Central Publishing. 453 pp., 29)
When Scott Turow's debut novel, "Presumed Innocent," was published in 1987, it was immediately apparent that a new master of the legal thriller had arrived. Turow's novel was a propulsive, astonishingly assured creation that had it all: a dark, brooding undertone, a satisfyingly convoluted plot, an intriguing central mystery and some of the most electric courtroom scenes ever put on paper.
The master of the legal thriller is still at the top of his game with "The Last Trial," which takes place once again in Kindle County, the fictional Midwestern setting for most of Turow's work. The new book also marks the return of Alejandro "Sandy" Stern, the brilliant defense attorney who first appeared in "Presumed Innocent." Stern is now an 85-year-old cancer survivor with multiple physical ailments. Against all logic and for very personal reasons, he has involved himself in a legal battle he knows he might not survive. His client is Dr. Kiril Pafko, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and distinguished cancer researcher. Stern and Pafko are longtime friends, and Stern thinks he owes his life to Pafko's groundbreaking treatments.
Pafko's research firm is responsible for developing g-Livia, a new anti-cancer drug that promises unprecedented results. Through the first year of an extended trial period, g-Livia lives up to that promise, leading to many beneficial outcomes. During the second year, a number of test subjects sicken and die. Compounding the problem, Pafko is accused of two related offenses: altering the data to hide the problem from the Food and Drug Administration and selling off a large block of stock before that data could be made public.
The question of Pafko's guilt or innocence is the novel's central mystery, but there is a corollary one involving a near-fatal car crash that may have been a deliberate attempt on Stern's life. Turow teases out these mysteries with immense skill and deliberation. The result is another intelligent page turner. Turow, though, has always been more than a popular entertainer. He is a first-rate novelist for whom the world of the courtroom becomes the vehicle for intense investigations into the varieties of human frailty.
Beneath its surface level of legal, medical and scientific detail, the narrative slowly unearths a history of greed, vengeance, intellectual dishonesty and acute family dysfunction.
"The Last Trial" is a novel about the complex process of coming to judgment, bringing order and partial clarity to the daily parade of human perversity. In the end, it is Stern's judgment, not that of judge or jury, that carries the greatest weight for the reader.
In confronting his old friend's failings, Stern is also forced to confront his own. In what is, appropriately, a kind of summation, he must take a hard look at both the forces that have shaped his life — childhood trauma, fear of poverty — and the relationships, with his wives, his children and the law itself, that have sustained him, however imperfectly. No one tells this sort of story better than Turow.
"The Last Trial" is Turow at his best and most ambitious. He has elevated the legal thriller genre once again.
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