Personal Injuries
A Novel
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
From bestselling author Scott Turow comes Personal Injuries, a gripping, suspenseful, deeply satisfying novel about corruption, deceit, and love.
Robbie Feaver (pronounced "favor") is a charismatic personal injury lawyer with a high profile practice, a way with the ladies, and a beautiful wife (whom he loves), who is dying of an irreversible illness. He also has a secret bank account where he occasionally deposits funds that make their way into the pockets of the judges who decide Robbie's cases.
Robbie is caught by the Feds, and, in exchange for leniency, agrees to "wear a wire" as he continues to try to fix decisions. The FBI agent assigned to supervise him goes by the alias of Evon Miller. She is lonely, uncomfortable in her skin, and impervious to Robbie's charms. And she carries secrets of her own.
As the law tightens its net, Robbie's and Evon's stories converge thrillingly. Scott Turow takes us into, the world of greed and human failing he has made immortal in Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof, Pleading Guilty, and The Laws of Our Fathers, all published by FSG. He also shows us enduring love and quiet, unexpected heroism. Personal Injuries is Turow's most reverberant, most moving novel-a powerful drama of individuals trying to escape their characters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unlike most of his fellow lawyer-novelists, Turow has always been more interested in character than plot, and in Robbie Feaver, a lawyer on the make who ends up fighting for his life, he has created his richest and most compelling figure yet. For years, Robbie has been paying off judges and squirreling away part of the riches he earns as a highly successful trial lawyer. When the IRS happens upon the money trail, and a top prosecutor leans on him to turn state's evidence and finger some of the corrupt justices, Robbie calls on George Mason, veteran Kindle County lawyer, to represent him and win the best deal he can. A complicating element in the case is Evon Miller, Mormon-born FBI agent in deep undercover, who is assigned to watch Feaver and finds herself, against her better inclinations, drawn to him--for Feaver is a character of almost Shakespearean contradictions. A charming, brash womanizer who nevertheless shows superhuman reserves of love and patience to his dying wife at home, he is always several jumps ahead of the prosecutors, the FBI and the reader, winning sympathy, even admiration, where there should be none. This patient account is fascinatingly detailed in the ways of the law and the justice system, of how Robbie zeroes in on the biggest target of all, only to be trumped at the last moment. It is also a deeply understanding look, in its portrait of Evon, of the motives that drive a solitary woman into police work (Thomas Harris's Clarice seems shallow by comparison). There are some remarkable narrative strategies--Turow deftly alternates a first-person and omniscient-author point of view, for example--but readers will not be concerned with technical details, only with the rare revelation of a paradoxical personality so compelling he makes the very adroit plot almost superfluous. 750,000 first printing; $500,000 ad/promo; first serial to Playboy; BOMC main selection; QPB selection; 9-city author tour; paperback rights to Warner; simultaneous Random House audio.
