Scott Frederick Turow was born on April 12, 1949, in Chicago, Illinois, and is of Russian Jewish descent. He is a best-selling American author and a lawyer. He writes crime and suspense novels about law and the legal profession. After receiving an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship, he attended Stanford’s Creative Writing Center. While at Stanford, he was a Jones Lecturer, a position he held until 1975, before Harvard Law School.
He received his Juris Doctor in 1978. After that, he began working as an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago, where he remained until 1986.
During his time as a lawyer, his greatest achievement was getting a death row inmate released. He had been on death row for over a decade for a crime he did not commit. This was one of his pro bono cases, as are the majority of Turow’s.
He now writes legal thrillers. His first thriller, “Presumed Innocent” was released in 1987. His work has been translated into 40 languages and sold 30 million copies worldwide.
Scott Turow Books in order
Kindle County Legal Thriller
- Presumed Innocent (1986)
- The Burden of Proof (1990)
- Pleading Guilty (1993)
- The Laws Of Our Fathers (1996)
- Personal Injuries (1999)
- Reversible Errors (2002)
- Limitations (2006)
- Innocent (2010)
- Identical (2013)
- Testimony (2017)
- The Last Trial (2020)
Standalone Novel
Standalone Non-fiction
Similar authors
- Robert Bailey’s McMurtrie and Drake series follows Law professor Thomas Jackson. When a power-hungry coworker uses an altercation between 2 students to ruin his career, he doesn’t know what to do next.
- Viktor Methos’s Desert Plains series tells the story of a troubled prosecutor. She is confronted with the deepest and darkest part of her past, as well as her greatest fears for the future.
See also: Walter Mosley Books in Order.
Most recommended books
- Presumed Innocent (Kindle County Legal Thriller #1) (4.10 Goodreads score)
- The Burden of Proof (Kindle County Legal Thriller #2) (4.06 Goodreads score)
- Innocent (Kindle County Legal Thriller #8) (3.92 Goodreads score)
- Ordinary Heroes (3.87 Goodreads score)
- The Last Trial (Kindle County #11) (3.87 Goodreads score)
Movies based on the books
Three of Turow’s books have been adapted into movies. These are “Presumed Innocent”, “Reversible Errors”, and “The Burden of Proof”. “Innocent” was turned into a TV series on TNT.
Upcoming releases
The next book by Scott Turow, titled Suspect, will be published on September 20th, 2022. It is the latest book in the Kindle County Legal Thriller Series.
Book summaries
Presumed Innocent (1986)
With three weeks to go in his boss’ re-election campaign, a member of Rusty’s staff is found murdered; he is charged with finding the killer, until his boss loses and, incredibly, Rusty finds himself accused of the murder.
The Burden of Proof (1990)
Late one spring afternoon, Alejandro Stern, the brilliant defense lawyer from Presumed Innocent, comes home from a business trip to find that Clara, his wife of thirty years, has committed suicide.
Pleading Guilty (1993)
The star litigator from a top-notch law firm has gone missing, along with 5.6 million dollars from a class-action settlement, and “Mack” Malloy, a foul-mouthed ex-cop and partner-on-the-wane must find both. Immediately.
The Laws Of Our Fathers (1996)
With its riveting suspense and indelibly drawn characters, this novel shows why Turow is not only the master of the modern legal thriller but also one of America’s most engaging and satisfying novelists.
Personal Injuries (1999)
Robbie Feaver (pronounced “favor”) is a charismatic personal injury lawyer with a high profile practice, a way with the ladies, and a beautiful wife (whom he loves), who is dying of an irreversible illness. He also has a secret bank account where he occasionally deposits funds that make their way into the pockets of the judges who decide Robbie’s cases. Robbie is caught by the Feds, and, in exchange for leniency, agrees to “wear a wire” as he continues to try to fix decisions. The FBI agent assigned to supervise him goes by the alias of Evon Miller. She is lonely, uncomfortable in her skin, and impervious to Robbie’s charms. And she carries secrets of her own. As the law tightens its net, Robbie’s and Evon’s stories converge thrillingly. Scott Turow takes us into, the world of greed and human failing he has made immortal in Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, and The Laws of Our Fathers, all published by FSG. He also shows us enduring love and quiet, unexpected heroism. Personal Injuries is Turow’s most reverberant, most moving novel-a powerful drama of individuals trying to escape their characters.
Reversible Errors (2002)
Rommy “Squirrel” Gandolph is a Yellow Man, an inmate on death row for a 1991 triple murder in Kindle County. His slow progress toward certain execution is nearing completion when Arthur Raven, a corporate lawyer who is Rommy’s reluctant court-appointed representative, receives word that another inmate may have new evidence that will exonerate Gandolph. Arthur’s opponent in the case is Muriel Wynn, Kindle County’s formidable chief deputy prosecuting attorney, who is considering a run for her boss’s job. Muriel and Larry Starczek, the original detective on the case, don’t want to see Rommy escape a fate they long ago determined he deserved, for a host of reasons. Further complicating the situation is the fact that Gillian Sullivan, the judge who originally found Rommy guilty, is only recently out of prison herself, having served time for taking bribes.
Limitations (2006)
Life would seem to have gone well for George Mason. His days as a criminal defense lawyer are long behind him. At fifty-nine, he has sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals in Kindle County for nearly a decade. Yet, when a disturbing rape case is brought before him, the judge begins to question the very nature of the law and his role within it. What is troubling George Mason so deeply? Is it his wife’s recent diagnosis? Or the strange and threatening e-mails he has started to receive? And what is it about this horrific case of sexual assault, now on trial in his courtroom, that has led him to question his fitness to judge?
Innocent (2010)
Twenty years after Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto went head to head in the shattering murder trial of Presumed Innocent, the men are once more pitted against one another in a riveting psychological match. When Sabich, now 60 years old and the chief judge of an appellate court, finds his wife Barbara dead under mysterious circumstances, Molto accuses him of murder for the second time, setting into motion a trial that is vintage Turow–the courtroom at its most taut and explosive. With his characteristic insight into both the dark truths of the human psyche and the dense intricacies of the criminal justice system, Scott Turow proves once again that some books simply compel us to read late into the night, desperate to know who did it.
Identical (2013)
State Senator Paul Giannis is a candidate for Mayor of Kindle County. His identical twin brother Cass is newly released from prison, 25 years after pleading guilty to the murder of his girlfriend, Dita Kronon. When Evon Miller, an ex-FBI agent who is the head of security for the Kronon family business, and private investigator Tim Brodie begin a re-investigation of Dita’s death, a complex web of murder, sex, and betrayal-as only Scott Turow could weave-dramatically unfolds…
Testimony (2017)
At the age of fifty, former prosecutor Bill Ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his law career, his wife, Kindle County, and even his country. Still, when he is tapped by the International Criminal Court–an organization charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity–he feels drawn to what will become the most elusive case of his career. Over ten years ago, in the apocalyptic chaos following the Bosnian war, an entire Roma refugee camp vanished. Now for the first time, a witness has stepped forward: Ferko Rincic claims that armed men marched the camp’s Gypsy residents to a cave in the middle of the night–and then with a hand grenade set off an avalanche, burying 400 people alive. Only Ferko survived. Boom’s task is to examine Ferko’s claims and determine who might have massacred the Roma. His investigation takes him from the International Criminal Court’s base in Holland to the cities and villages of Bosnia and secret meetings in Washington, DC, as Boom sorts through a host of suspects, ranging from Serb paramilitaries, to organized crime gangs, to the US government itself, while also maneuvering among the alliances and treacheries of those connected to the case: Layton Merriwell, a disgraced US major general desperate to salvage his reputation; Sergeant Major Atilla Doby,a vital cog in American military operations near the camp at the time of Roma’s disappearance; Laza Kajevic, the brutal former leader of the Bosnian Serbs; Esma Czarni, Ferko’s alluring barrister; and of course, Ferko himself, on whose testimony the entire case rests-and who may know more than he’s telling.
The Last Trial (2020)
At eighty-five years old, Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, a brilliant defense lawyer with his health failing but spirit intact, is on the brink of retirement. But when his old friend Dr. Kiril Pafko, a former Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, is faced with charges of insider trading, fraud, and murder, his entire life’s work is put in jeopardy, and Stern decides to take on one last trial. In a case that will be the defining coda to both men’s accomplished lives, Stern probes beneath the surface of his friend’s dazzling veneer as a distinguished cancer researcher. As the trial progresses, he will question everything he thought he knew about his friend. Despite Pafko’s many failings, is he innocent of the terrible charges laid against him? How far will Stern go to save his friend, and — no matter the trial’s outcome — will he ever know the truth? Stern’s duty to defend his client and his belief in the power of the judicial system both face a final, terrible test in the courtroom, where the evidence and reality are sometimes worlds apart.
Ordinary Heroes (2005)
Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he’d been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart’s mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father’s death, a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancée, and learns of his father’s court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family’s secret history and driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who’d always refused to talk about his war. As he pieces together his father’s past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote while in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. He learns how Dubin, a JAG lawyer attached to Patton’s Third Army and desperate for combat experience, got more than he bargained for when he was ordered to arrest Robert Martin, a wayward OSS officer who, despite his spectacular bravery with the French Resistance, appeared to be acting on orders other than his commanders’. In pursuit of Martin, Dubin and his sergeant are parachuted into Bastogne just as the Battle of the Bulge reaches its apex. Pressed into the leadership of a desperately depleted rifle company, the men are forced to abandon their quest for Martin and his fiery, maddeningly elusive comrade, Gita, as they fight for their lives through carnage and chaos the likes of which Dubin could never have imagined. In reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, Stewart gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father’s character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.
One L (1977)
Not only does it introduce with remarkable clarity the ideas and issues that are the stuff of legal education; it brings alive the anxiety and competitiveness–with others and, even more, with oneself–that set the tone in this crucible of character building. Each September, a new crop of students enter Harvard Law School to begin an intense, often grueling, sometimes harrowing year of introduction to the law. Turow’s group of One Ls are fresh, bright, ambitious, and more than a little daunting. Even more impressive are the faculty. Will the One Ls survive? Will they excel? Will they make the Law Review, the outward and visible sign of success in this ultra-conservative microcosm? With remarkable insight into both his fellows and himself, Turow leads us through the ups and downs, the small triumphs and tragedies of the year, in an absorbing and thought-provoking narrative that teaches the reader not only about law school and the law but about the human beings who make them what they are.
Ultimate Punishment (2003)
Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. In “real life,” as a respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade, including successfully representing two different men convicted in death-penalty prosecutions. In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois Commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan’s unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office. Along the way, he provides a brief history of America’s ambivalent relationship with the ultimate punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victims’ survivors, and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the Governor’s Mansion to Illinois’ state-of-the art ‘super-max’ prison and the execution chamber.
