Trial and no error
In yet another Stern outing, author Turow elevates the genre for which he’s known
The Last Trial
Scott Turow
Grand Central Publishing
When Scott Turow’s debut novel, Presumed Innocent, was published in 1987, it was immediately apparent that a new master of the legal thriller had arrived.
His latest, The Last Trial, takes place once again in Kindle County, the fictional Midwestern setting for most of Turow’s work. The new book also marks the return of Alejandro (Sandy) Stern, the brilliant defence attorney who first appeared in Presumed Innocent. Over the years, Stern has played a number of roles, both major and minor, in Turow’s fiction. This time, he takes centre stage as lead counsel in a long, exhausting trial that will, as the title tells us, be his last.
Stern is now an 85-year-old cancer survivor with multiple physical ailments. Against all logic and for very personal reasons, he has involved himself in a legal battle he knows he might not survive. His client is Dr. Kiril Pafko, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and distinguished cancer researcher. Stern and Pafko are longtime friends, and Stern thinks he owes his life to Pafko’s groundbreaking treatments.
Pafko is co-founder of a research firm (Pafko Therapeutics) responsible for developing g-Livia, a new anti-cancer drug that promises unprecedented results. Through the first year of an extended trial period, g-Livia lives up to that promise, leading to many beneficial outcomes. During the second year, a number of test subjects sicken and die, bringing testing to a halt and leaving g-Livia with an uncertain future. Compounding the problem, Pafko is accused of two related offences: Altering the data to hide the problem from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and selling off a large block of stock before that data could be made public.
At the age of 78, accused of fraud, insider trading and multiple counts of homicide, he faces the very real prospect of life in prison.
The trial that follows is a complex and highly technical affair. Turow has done his homework, and his incremental presentation of the evidence not only illuminates the legal issues involved, but it also offers a thorough, digestible account of the steps — research, development, testing — by which a newly created drug is brought to market. Turow is particularly good at integrating this arcane material into a dramatic narrative. Readers of The Last Trial will find themselves both entertained and painlessly educated.
The result is another intelligent page turner by an acknowledged master. Turow, though, has always been more than a popular entertainer. He is a first-rate novelist for whom the world of the courtroom — a world in which the justice done is only “rough and approximate” — becomes the vehicle for intense investigations into the varieties of human frailty.
The Last Trial is a novel about the complex process of coming to judgment, bringing order and partial clarity to the daily parade of human perversity. No one tells this sort of story better than Turow. He has elevated the genre once again.
For The Washington Post