His qualifications for such a change of role are unclear, but Boom – who, happily, induces more than one character in the novel to exclaim “Boom!” when he walks into a room – learns about the machinery of the international criminal court from various friendly characters who are only too happy to act as exposition funnels.Īcting as a funnel for more than exposition, meanwhile, is a devastatingly attractive younger woman, Esma, who is the advocate for the witness testifying to the massacre in court. The hero-narrator is one Bill ten Boom, an American of Dutch descent, in his mid-50s and recently divorced, who takes a break from his legal career in white-collar fraud to go to the Hague and prosecute an alleged massacre of 400 Roma in Bosnia in 2004. This novel is a departure, swapping mysteries of domestic murder in small-town Kindle county - a fictional Illinois community that is his equivalent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county in Mississippi - for a mystery about an alleged war crime in the former Yugoslavia. His bestselling Presumed Innocent and subsequent novels were brilliantly twisty legal thrillers that were also rich and reflective character studies. Scott Turow began his career as the literary version of John Grisham.
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