As Rusty sets out to solve the murder, he discovers that all the clues point back to him.

Rusty’s boss, Raymond Horgan, the chief P.A., is up for re-election, and with his busy schedule, he assigns Sabich to investigate the crime. Rusty is married to Barbara, who is quiet, moody and fiercely devoted to both her husband and their eight-year-old son Nat. He is the chief deputy prosecuting attorney in the county, and was involved in an affair with Carolyn that ended just a few months before her murder. The protagonist and narrator of the story, Rusty Sabich, is a colleague and ex-lover of Carolyn. She was found brutally murdered and raped in her own apartment, and all evidence seems to suggest that the perpetrator knew Carolyn intimately. The book begins with the death of Carolyn Polhemus, a deputy prosecuting attorney in Kindle County, a fictional city in the Midwest. It is considered a breakthrough novel in the genre of mystery fiction precisely because of Turow’s success in merging highbrow literary techniques into a genre that is often dominated by an action-driven plot without much emphasis on character development. It spent 45 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and is one of the very first novels of its kind – namely the murder mystery genre, that also successfully explores the craft of character development through skillful narration, a sophisticated storyline and a piercing look into the complex psychological makeup of the story’s central characters. Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent, his first published murder mystery/legal thriller novel in 1987, was a phenomenal success both with the critics and the popular readers.

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