Reversible Errors.

Scott Turow Farrar, Straus, and Giroux www.fsgbooks.com 448 pp., $28

When you have a rainy day and a steady supply of hot tea, there's nothing better than melding with the couch and tucking into a Chandler or a Christie or a Grisham. Chewing through these books is like scarfing a bag of potato chips in front of the TV. The next day you don't remember the plot--or eating the whole bag. They taste good, they go down easily, and they're just as easily forgotten.

I'd never tried the Turow "flavor," so I picked up his latest, Reversible Errors. But this was no container of slightly stale, store-brand chips. Scott Turow's characters are challenged morally, ethically, and emotionally--and respond with a depth lacking in most legal potboilers. Add an intricate plot, in which Good and Evil are both clothed in gray, and the reader can't plow through without paying attention.

The story involves inmate Rommy "Squirrel" Gandolph, who is on death row for a 1991 triple murder at the working-class Paradise restaurant in a city that isn't called Chicago but clearly is. Arthur Raven, a former prosecutor who's now a partner at a corporate firm, is assigned to represent Gandolph, who has declared his innocence after exhausting all appeals.

Raven thinks of himself as a personal failure with an active fantasy life. He "did not know exactly what he had done wrong with women to leave him single at the age of 38. Appearance was one issue, he realized." Balding, hirsute, and round, with "birdy little legs," he has looked middle-aged since law school. After a brief, failed marriage, he's spent his emotions caring for his schizophrenic sister and late father. The rest of his "fury and passion" go into the law, and he focuses this force on Gandolph's case, even though his client has been described as "a few sandwiches short of a picnic."

The book travels back 10 years to the original investigation into the murders of restaurant proprietor Gus Leonidis; Luisa Remardi, a ticket agent for TN Air; and a bystander. It covers detective Larry Starczek's original legwork on the case--including interviews with Erno Erdai, the chief of airport security and a wannabe cop--and Starczek's convoluted relationship with Muriel Wynn, Kindle County's chief deputy prosecuting attorney. The author also skillfully introduces several characters whose roles become evident later, and he reveals the secret life of the judge who convicted Rommy--Gillian Sullivan, "the courthouse glamor girl, visually striking, intellectually formidable ... fastidiously assembled and powerfully scented."

Then the plot fast-forwards to 2001, when Wynn is considering a run for chief prosecutor and Sullivan is selling cosmetics at a department store after serving time for taking bribes. Erdai, in jail for murdering a man, is dying of cancer and sets the plot in motion with a deathbed confession to Sullivan and Raven. The book's title comes into play as Raven increasingly believes there has been a reversible error, "a legal mistake made by a trial court that is so significant that an appellate court reviewing the case must set aside the trial court's judgment." To correct it, the trial court must dismiss the case, retry it, or modify the death sentence. The events surrounding the murder are replayed as new evidence comes to light and Raven battles Wynn and Starczek, who believe there was no error.

What elevates the ensuing courtroom drama above the prime-time TV level is Turow's refusal to paint the issue in black and white. Both sides suffer doubts and must make moral choices, largely the "correct" ones, within a system that every legal practitioner knows does not always function entirely for the greater good.

While the author presents an adept portrait of inner turmoil, his depictions of sexual contact are less fine-tuned. I will presume Turow innocent and assume the clumsy language and images--can we not invoke the Richter scale?--are meant to reflect the awkwardness of the relationships themselves.

I have to wait three years for the next Turow, but luckily I have a library card and immediate access to the first six. I hope it rains soon.

Rebecca Porter is an associate editor of TRIAL