Kindle County

About the Kindle County series

Scott Turow's Kindle County novels are set in a fictional Illinois county modelled closely on Cook County and Chicago, and they collectively did more than almost any other body of work to define the modern legal thriller. Presumed Innocent (1987) -- following prosecutor Rusty Sabich as he's charged with the murder of a colleague he'd been having an affair with -- was a genuine publishing phenomenon that established Turow, a practising attorney, as a writer who could make courtroom procedure and legal ethics as tense as any crime plot, and its twist ending became one of the genre's most imitated. Subsequent novels move between different protagonists within the same prosecutor's office, judiciary, and defence bar -- Sandy Stern, George Mason, Sonny Klonsky, Rusty Sabich again decades later -- so the series functions less as a single detective's case files and more as an ongoing portrait of one legal community across nearly four decades.

Turow returned to Rusty Sabich twice more, in Innocent (2010) and The Last Trial (2020), each revisiting the central relationships of Presumed Innocent from a new angle decades on, and Presumed Guilty (2025) continues Rusty's story again as the series' most recent instalment.