Book Review: Scott Turow’s The Last Trial Is The Real Deal

Scott Turow’s The Last Trial

Is The Real Deal by Sarah Gordon

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lawyers like to read about other lawyers, perhaps especially fictional ones. Equally true is that no one, not even other lawyers, wants to read stories about real estate closings or software licensing. For the most part, not even a saga about knock-down, drag-out, bet-the-farm civil litigation is worthy of staying up too late reading, much less getting up early to write. That means most legal works of fiction are focused on criminal defense, often with the death penalty or a long prison sentence on the line. Even with such compelling content, many legal novels fall short, whether because they venture too far from how it works in real life, or because they fail to capture the nuances of evidence and strategy, emotion and psychology. It is a rare courtroom drama that digs deep and gets all the details right. Scott Turow’s latest novel, The Last Trial, ticks all the boxes and then some.

The title refers to the last case tried by Sandy Stern, a well-seasoned criminal defense attorney. If you’re a fan of Turow’s work, then you know that we first met Sandy Stern over 30 years ago in Presumed Innocent, Turow’s first novel set in fictional Kindle County, a suburb of an unnamed Midwestern city that sounds an awful lot like Chicago. The 1990 movie of the same name starred the marvelous late Raúl Juliá as Stern and Harrison Ford as Rusty Sabich, a Kindle County ADA accused of murdering his colleague with whom he had an affair (spoiler alert – the wife did it), and was successful largely because the script adhered very closely to the novel. Turow went on to feature Stern throughout the other nine Kindle County novels, sometimes as the main character, and other times in the background.

Since securing a dismissal for Rusty Sabich in Presumed Innocent, Stern has formed a practice with his daughter, Marta, outlived two wives and become estranged from his son. He has also hired Pinky, his somewhat lost, liberally pierced and tattooed granddaughter, as his paralegal. As an immigrant – Sandy is short for Alejandro – Stern knows what it is to be “other,” a minority, a misfit. He sees something in Pinky that others who won’t venture past the exterior do not.

Stern’s client this go-round is Dr. Kiril Pafko, a lifelong friend and fellow Argentinian who finds himself charged with fraud, insider trading and murder over the clinical trial of a life-saving cancer drug he developed that went south in the worst way. About a year into the trial, several patients suddenly died, and the government is seeking to hold Dr. Pafko responsible not just for

“Cecil,” Stern tells him, “I cannot count the number of prosecutions where Marta and I felt we had decimated every witness for the government, and the jury returned with a guilty verdict even before we had time to leave the courthouse for lunch.” This, regrettably, is not false modesty. Unlike civil cases, where the venire come to court knowing nothing about either side, juries usually start criminal cases with faith in the prosecutors whom they tend to regard as public servants working for them. Stern shares with Cecil the watchword Marta and

their deaths, but also for hiding the results and cashing in before the news went public. Against overwhelming evidence, Sandy and Marta poke holes in the government’s case one witness at a time, causing counsel for the pharmaceutical company observing the trial to express hope for acquittal. But Stern stops him before he jinxes the whole thing:

he have learned to live by: ‘The zombies keep coming.’ The phrase is borrowed from Henry, Marta’s younger son, who, when he was twelve, offered that quick summary of a video game he was playing. No matter how many zombies the good guys kill off, there are always more, and one inevitably will get you. Sooner or later a jury throws up its hands at the notion that person after person has shown up on the witness stand to lie or that time and again the government has gotten things wrong.

“The zombies keep coming.”

Zombies notwithstanding, in the courtroom, few can match Sandy Stern. There, despite his accent – a mix of Spanish and Yiddish – and old-school European mannerisms, he belongs. At 85, Stern is as sharp as ever. This is not to say that he always gets it right. He doesn’t. That’s one of the best things about Turow: he writes it like it happens, both the triumphs and the mistakes. And he vividly describes the agonizing self-flagellation lawyers put themselves through when they make an error in judgment: the lost sleep, the replaying of the moment over and over in one’s head, the bringing it up in conversation time and again, long after everyone else has moved on. As any lawyer well knows, you’re only as good as your last misstep.

As to why Stern made the questionable decision to represent his oldest friend in a murder trial instead of referring him to someone else, there is a reason: he owes him. Stern suffers from the very form of cancer that Dr. Pafko’s miracle drug is meant to cure, and in his case it worked. So how could he say no? It is only when they are too far down the road that Stern realizes that his friend has secrets he never even imagined, things he was too close to see. As Turow puts it, “[a] little like compulsive gamblers who can’t resist another bet, no matter what the odds, fraud defendants always want to try to sell their story to someone else.” Often that someone else is their own lawyer.

In The Last Trial, it is Pinky’s gut instincts that prove decisive. For all her failures, she is a born investigator. She somehow knows not to try to make the facts fit the theory, but rather to keep asking questions, to persist in asking why, especially when things seem to tie up in neat little bows. Often that is a sign that something has been overlooked – something that could prove deadly, whether to the case or otherwise.

For all the talk of justice as the ultimate pursuit of truth, Turow shows us that it’s much more complicated than that. With every trial, there is always something left undiscovered, and the outcome rarely resolves every question. But for the lawyers, there is a truth they cannot escape: the one about themselves.

Sarah Gordon sgordon@sgrlaw.com

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