'REVERSIBLE ERRORS' With twists, turns, novel entertains

The writer defines characters in sharp, concise ways.
By WILLIAM W. STARR
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
'Reversible Errors' by Scott Turow; Farrar, Straus & amp; Giroux ($28).
"The power of the law made right what it had first made wrong," best-selling author Scott Turow writes in what could well serve as the summary of his sixth book, a marvelously complex novel about the death penalty and the misjudgments of people involved with it.
Whether he's writing about prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges or even defendants, Turow builds his cast with care, creating characterizations of people as flawed as those in the real world.
Not a person in the book could completely qualify as a hero or heroine; each has a past to confront, and some readers might find it difficult to know whom to root for.
The novel is cleverly constructed with jumps in time that are never confusing and essential for plot clarity. But it's important to pay close attention. The plot twists are not obvious, another reason Turow remains our finest novelist on legal issues.
His books have depth and insight -- and occasional purplish prose, perhaps -- but they also are knockout good entertainment. You could get a whiplash just negotiating the unexpected turns in "Reversible Errors."
The characters
The centerpiece here is Arthur Raven, a undistinguished big-firm corporate lawyer who's been assigned to take the 11th-hour appeal of an inmate sentenced to die for murdering three people.
The accused is Rommy Gandolph, known as "Squirrel," slight of build and mind, convicted of a triple homicide a decade earlier and now just weeks away from the death penalty.
He's up against Muriel Wynn, a determined young prosecutor, and detective Larry Starczek, who worked the original case and who has been sleeping off and on with Muriel in what is a tangled relationship (she's now married but unhappily so) that could have had an effect on the investigation into Gandolph's crime.
And then there's Gillian Sullivan, the presiding judge in the original case, who since has been removed from the bench for bribery. That's not the least of her secrets, however.
Raven is searching for grounds for appeal for Gandolph. Some records indicate the inmate actually was incarcerated when the murder occurred, but without corroboration, there's nothing solid for appeal.
Until, that is, a death-bed confession turns up from another inmate and a series of procedural foul-ups begins to unravel the case.
Meanwhile, Turow dissects the legal world with the skill of a good surgeon. The criminal bar, he writes, "was much like a repertory theater company in which every attorney was apt to have a turn at each part. The prosecutor against whom you tried a case was on the bench the next time you saw her, and in private practice hustling your clients a decade after that."
His characterizations are sharp. Consider this take on the prosecutor: "She had come from a normal white-bread family. But she must have been calculating in the womb. Like cows who always knew the shortest path to their destination, Muriel had a positioning system of her own that never failed to highlight the route to her best interests."