For me to pretend that I created all of that - even my vanity doesn’t run that far.” Look at the wide range of movies and books and TV shows about the law you ended up with -Court TV, an entire television devoted to trials.

“There were a lot of social forces at work that I think made people intensely curious about the law. “I would love to believe that I totally reinvented the world, but I don’t,” says Turow, who still lives near Chicago, where he practices law.

Turow, a former prosecutor, sees himself as the lucky beneficiary of timing. It’s a ripping good story with a fabulous twist, sure, but it’s the characters and the quality of the writing that mark Turow as more than just another legal thriller writer.” Even the supporting characters “are all well-drawn and psychologically complex. “When I read ‘Presumed Innocent,’ I was immediately struck by how textured and multidimensional his characters were,” she says. Yet the strength of Turow’s books lies less in place and plot than in the power of the storytelling, says literature professor Katherine Min, who includes “Presumed Innocent” in her Murder and Imagination course at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. The terrain bears a striking resemblance to Turow’s native Cook County, with a nameless city somewhat smaller than Chicago as its urban center and the hapless Trappers professional baseball team to match the star-crossed Chicago Cubs. The new book continues to explore the geography on which Turow’s other eight novels took place - the fictional Kindle County.

Presumed innocent turow