What is this about?
Sandy Stern is asked to defend a former Nobel prizewinner and friend from charges of fraud and murder regarding a new cancer drug Dr Kiril Pafko’s company has released into the market. However, what Sandy discovers instead that in essence, Kiril is the cancer at the centre of his family, and the truth of the drug that he released into the market is darker than he thought.
What else is this about?
Sandy is on the brink of retirement, aged in body even if his spirit may not be. I think this is a goodbye in some ways for Sandy, though it has to be said he doesn’t need to be in ca courtroom to be an awesome character to read about. It’s also an immigrant’s story, with Sandy look back at his life and loves that come as he nears the end of the case, and the book. I wondered about the timing of this release, and the emphasis on this part of Sandy’s life: his love for America and how being an immigrant shaped him in American.
Blurb
In this explosive legal thriller from New York Times bestselling author Scott Turow, two formidable men collide: a celebrated criminal defense lawyer at the end of his career and his lifelong friend, a renowned doctor accused of murder.
At eighty-five years old, Alejandro “Sandy” Stern, a brilliant defense lawyer with his health failing but spirit intact, is on the brink of retirement. But when his old friend Dr. Kiril Pafko, a former Nobel Prize winner in Medicine, is faced with charges of insider trading, fraud, and murder, his entire life’s work is put in jeopardy, and Stern decides to take on one last trial.
In a case that will be the defining coda to both men’s accomplished lives, Stern probes beneath the surface of his friend’s dazzling veneer as a distinguished cancer researcher. As the trial progresses, he will question everything he thought he knew about his friend. Despite Pafko’s many failings, is he innocent of the terrible charges laid against him? How far will Stern go to save his friend, and — no matter the trial’s outcome — will he ever know the truth?
Stern’s duty to defend his client and his belief in the power of the judicial system both face a final, terrible test in the courtroom, where the evidence and reality are sometimes worlds apart.
Full of the deep insights into the spaces where the fragility of human nature and the justice system collide, Scott Turow’s The Last Trial is a masterful legal thriller that unfolds in page-turning suspense — and questions how we measure a life.
In The Last Trial, Sandy and his daughter and law partner, Marta, are asked to defend an old friend of Sandy’s, Kiril Pafko from charges of insider trading, fraud and murder. Those charges are related to the release of a new cancer drug on to the market, one that Pafko was sure would gain him accolades and the admiration of the world.
Before I get to the compelling characterisation, The Last Trial is very much a legal drama of a book. The courtroom action supplements the characterisation and other parts of the book itself, with some mind bending revelations coming out on the stand that reset my thinking around what was actually going on in the book.
But it’s the characterisation that kept me glued to this book.
The reason I adore Sandy is Raul Julia’s brilliant turn as him in Presumed Innocent, a movie from way back when and based on one of the initial books in Turow’s Kindle County series. That gravity and that voice is what I imagined in my head the entire time reading this.
As it turned out, I actually liked Sandy in the book much more than I thought I would. This is his story, his last trial so there are secondary characters around the book like his family and his daughter Marta especially that at first I thought didn’t get enough attention. But after I finished, I realised it wasn’t the end of their story, just Sandy’s as a trial lawyer.
Kiril is a reminder of Sandy’s past, and his very presence takes Sandy in a trip down memory lane literally and figuratively. He thinks about his past, his marriages, and his family. It’s a thoughtful exploration of how he has been shaped, and how he has shaped those closest to him and around him.
It’s also in direct contrast to Kiril and his family. Kiril is his friend, one he has known for years and holds in high esteem. But, the trial and the circumstances around it bring the truth of who Kiril is, and how he behaves with his family to light in the ugliest way much to Sandy’s dismay. However, Sandy will do his job, because above all else Sandy adores the law.
That regard for their chosen vocations is another difference that contrasts who these two men are to great effect.
It’s hard to describe the importance of their relationship in the right way: they are bound by being immigrants, thrown together in American by wanting to be the best in their fields and to move past their poor childhoods. Their childhoods marked them in similar ways, but in vastly different ones as well: they both rose to the pinnacle in their careers, had the security that wealth and success afforded them and they are both such different men in the end: Sandy will draw his family around him, and strive to make peace with them, or give them his blessing with whatever decisions they make, no matter what he may actually think of him. Kiril’s trial, however, showed just how much he didn’t care — never really cared for his, as much as they wanted him to.
What he wanted was what they could give him — ownership of an unattainable woman that became his wife, and the adoration his intelligent son could give him, without Kiril ever having to return the same. Kiril himself made me sympathise with him and hate him by the end for very different reasons to do with the case.
These contrasts and the way Turow unveiled and the truth of Kiril, his family and what actually happened around the drug was utterly superb. It’s not a book given to big courtroom antics, it’s instead a book devoted to characters, to the contrast of two men and their stories, that led to an absolutely unexpected resolution to the case
