You’re a lawyer and you want to make even more than a six-figure salary. Should you specialize in celebrity divorce law or write a novel?
Before you leap for the first choice, consider Scott Turow and John Grisham. These two guys are trading best sellers at a faster pace than sparring starlets switching bedmates. Turow’s and Grisham’s books-and, now, their movies-are hotter than stolen guns in the evidence room.
Turow broke into the genre first with “Presumed Innocent,” followed shortly by “The Burden of Proof.” And that set the precedent for Grisham’s “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and his latest, “The Client.”
Both are well-represented in audio, with several versions of each title-a result of legal intricacies in the copyright arena.
Now along comes another Turow, “Pleading Guilty,” just in time to benefit from any overflow of audience enthusiasm from the movie version of Grisham’s “The Firm.”
First on the block with the audio version is Simon & Schuster, with a 4 1/2-hour abridgment read by Stacy Keach and selling for $24. Other versions will follow as surely as a sentencing does a verdict. But until they do, members of the audio jury will have to content themselves with this.
And that, I submit, is no difficult task.
The story is told in the first person, from the viewpoint of a lawyer hired to look into the disappearance of both a partner and a rather large sum of an important client’s money-$5.6 million, to be precise.
Keach is a fine reader. He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of private eye Mike Hammer in the TV series of the same name, and he brings that same tough guy/sensitive guy quality to this recording. It makes for easy listening.
But the abridgment, as usual, leaves something to be desired. By the end of the story, you realize that all the details probably hung together pretty well in the 386-page book, but the connections aren’t quite as taut in the condensation.
If you agree to ignore the gaps and take the story on faith, it can be a lot of fun, what with a body in the refrigerator, gamblers fixing games, a secret bank account and a nymphomaniac law partner.
– Edwin Newman is the perfect reader for David Halberstam’s take on “The Fifties” (Random House, $22.50), eminently authoritative and interested. But compared with the 684-page book, this abridged, four-hour foray into the decade moves through the material like a ’57 Chevy in a drag race.
