This morning I finished Personal Injuries by Scott Turow.

Another excellent book from Turow. While technically in the legal thriller genre, Turow's characters are so real that they elevate his works well beyond that genre. His plots are also a stand out, avoiding the cliches and action packed finales that show up in a lot of genre writing.

This one involves the efforts of a DA to bring down a number of crooked judges in Kindle County, the setting of all Turow's books. In an unexpected choice, the protagonist is actually the defense attorney of the lawyer who is pushed into being an informant. He is almost totally passive in the book, serving almost exclusively as a conduit to tell others story, mainly that of the informant and the FBI agent that has to shadow him as he tries to get the crooked judges and civil servants to expose themselves on tape.

In addition to being a great read with some wonderful, complex characters, it also serves as a procedural for how complex investigations can play out, with interesting but believable twists and turns along the way.