Turow thrills with ‘Testimony’

Some men cope with a divorcecum-midlife crisis by running marathons or trading in their Volvo station wagon for a tangerine-colored sports car. Attorney Bill ten Boom, the narrator of Scott Turow’s smart, demanding new thriller, takes a more altruistic path. Forsaking Kindle County, the Chicago-like setting of so much of Turow’s fiction, Boom (as almost everyone calls him) accepts an invitation to be a special prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As his full surname suggests, Boom’s family has Dutch roots, making his relocation something of a homecoming.

His assignment is to learn exactly what happened in 2004 at a refugee camp in Tuzla, Bosnia, where 400 Roma (or, in less politically correct parlance, Gypsies) were allegedly buried alive, it’s unclear by whom. One possibility is Serbian forces led by their sadistic, amoral and still-at-large commander, Laza Kajevic, described by Boom as having “the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country’s and his rantings the voice of his people’s long-suppressed rage.” Another possibility is the U.S. Army, which comes under suspicion because the atrocity occurred in an area under American control during a NATO peacekeeping mission.

What Boom knows about the massacre comes from a single source, Ferko Rincic, a Roma eyewitness and the sole survivor. Boom works closely with Ferko’s lawyer and interpreter, Esma Czarni, herself born Roma and now based in London. Outside the courtroom, Esma’s salient feature is her robust sexuality. Long before the smitten prosecutor admits to having played the consummate fool, the reader sees “Little Miss Gypsy Hotpants” for what she is: a femme with plenty of fatale.

At times, the movements of soldiers and civilians in the Bosnia of 2004 become almost too convoluted to follow, but don’t give up. Just when you’re wishing you had jotted down major plot points, a character will deliver a capsule summary of where things stand.

The real pleasure of the new novel lies not so much in solving the mystery of the massacre as in watching Turow knock down assumption after assumption made by Boom — and the reader. In fact, I can’t think of another novel in which so many givens end up being exposed as either honest mistakes or outright lies. “Testimony” is a tour de force of collapsing perceptions.