Pleading Guilty

Kindle County, Where skies are generally gray and the truth is seldom simple, is one of the most renowned and fascinating locales in contemporary American fiction. In Pleading Guilty Scott Turow takes us there again, in an edge-of-the-chair story rife with indelible characters and riveting suspense - 1993's most unforgettable reading experience. Our guide is McCormack A. "Mack" Malloy, fiftyish ex-cop, almost ex-drunk, and partner-on-the-wane at Gage & Griswell, one of Kindle County's top-notch law firms, who has been charged by the firm's Oversight Committee with a highly sensitive task. Bert Kamin, G & G's gifted, erratic, impossibly combative star litigator, has been missing for weeks. Also missing is $5.6 million from a fund established to settle a massive air-disaster class-action suit against TransNational Airlines, the world's largest carrier and G & G's biggest client. The Committee needs Mack to find Bert and the money. Immediately. His search takes us into the inner sanctums of G & G, where Mack's close-to-the-vest partners - among them his good friend and sometime bedmate Emilia "Brushy" Bruccia - jockey and plot. He ventures into the dark heart of the city itself, to the Russian bath in the far West End, where the mysterious Kam Roberts has left tracks. Before long he runs up against his former beat partner and longtime nemesis, the odious Pigeyes. And a cold corpse. Mack is foul-mouthed, expansive, and sensual, weighed down by a profound familiarity with the ways of the world and his own ineradicable weaknesses, yet blessed with an incorrigible black-Irish sense of humor. He carries secrets of his own and knows that, as the police are fond of saying, there are no victims.Lovable, unreliable, a master sleuth, and an inimitable guide to an ominous and enthralling world, he may well be Scott Turow's supreme fictional creation to date.