A Lawyer on The Lam

By Paul Gray

TITLE: PLEADING GUILTY

AUTHOR: SCOTT TUROW

PUBLISHER: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 386 PAGES; $24

THE BOTTOM LINE: In this irresistible tale, Turow proves it is hard to catch a thief when nearly everyone seems suspect.

A slight, er, problem has cropped up at the large (68 partners) law firm of Gage & Griswell; the Management Oversight Committee wonders if maybe McCormack A. ("Mack") Malloy might not be able to help them solve it. Seems that Bert Kamin, like his friend Mack a partner at Gage & Griswell, has disappeared, and so has about $5.6 million. The money was lifted from an account the firm had assembled to settle insurance claims against the fatal crash of a TransNational Air plane in 1985. Since TN is by far the firm's biggest and most lucrative account, the missing money could prove especially embarrassing; evidence of embezzlement might prompt the airline's executives to look elsewhere for legal help. So why doesn't Mack just find Bert and persuade him to give the money back?

In other words, Scott Turow is about to condemn another summer's worth of beachgoers to addictive page turning.

The setting is Kindle County, the imaginary Midwestern tract that also provided the Rust Belt backdrop for Turow's first two best-selling novels, Presumed Innocent (1987) and The Burden of Proof (1990). The moral climate remains much the same as in the earlier books: inducements to lie, cheat, steal, even kill, proliferate, while those in the legal profession -- unsworn priests of the social order -- struggle to sift right from wrong and to keep themselves, if possible, uncorrupted.

That is not easy for Mack Malloy, Turow's most complex and problematic hero to date. Pushing 50, Mack agrees to look for the missing partner because he fears his own high-paying job at Gage & Griswell may be in jeopardy; if he succeeds, he should be able to coast on his partners' gratitude for a few more years. The idea of the chase appeals to the ex-cop in him. And the job may distract him from the dreariness of his personal life: his recent divorce, his unruly adolescent son, the drinking problem he hopes he has solved by abstinence.

There is something else too. The idea that his friend Kamin has actually pulled off such a scam intrigues him: "What a notion! Grabbing all that dough and hieing out for parts unknown. The wealth, the freedom, the chance to start anew! I wasn't sure if I was more shocked or thrilled."

Needless to say -- this is, after all, a Scott Turow novel -- the matter of the purloined money proves to be far more complicated than Mack or his colleagues anticipated. Finding Kamin turns out to be the easy part; the identity of the person who finally winds up with the millions remains perfectly hidden until almost the very end of the book.

Turow has been justifiably heralded for his plotting skills, but such praise has overshadowed his other great strength as a writer of popular entertainments. He is genuinely interested in showing what makes his characters behave the way they do. Mack remembers the late Leotis Griswell, one of the founding partners of his firm, saying, "So much of life is will." Having seen -- as a cop and a lawyer -- enough malefactors blame everyone for their misdeeds except themselves, Mack would like to believe that people are free to make choices: "Better to find options than that bondage of cause and effect. It all goes back to Augustine. We choose the Good. Or the Evil. And pay the price."

The events of this novel, though, rattle Mack's faith in human autonomy. He sees people close to him behaving at the dictates of compulsions they do not understand or control. He begins to wonder whether he is not doing the same. Pleading Guilty is both an irresistible tale and a dark, moral thriller.