Scott Turow Brings Rusty Back

More than two decades ago, I picked up Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent” and couldn’t put it down. When it became a movie with Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Raul Julia, Brian Dennehy, Joe Grifasi, John Spencer, and Paul Winfield, I rushed to see it and was gratified that it lived up to the book.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend mentioned that Turow had finally written a sequel, “Innocent,” which picked up the story of Rusty Sabich, the former prosecutor who became a judge but found himself accused of murder yet again. I quickly went out and got the new book and, as before, couldn’t put it down.

I enjoyed it so much that I e-mailed Turow and invited him to talk about it on my radio show. During that conversation, I asked him why he’d decided to bring Rusty back, whether he’d had an “a-ha!” moment that gave him the jumping off point for the plot, why he’s always used fictional Kindle County instead of real locales, and whether he heard the voices of the movie actors in his head as he wrote the dialogue for his characters.

Listen to our conversation here.