Scott Turow’s Suspect is a fast-flowing suspense/thriller/crime story of Pinky Granum, her lawyer boss Rik Dudek and their client, Lucy Gomez, Chief of Highland Isle’s Police Department who is on trial for soliciting sex in exchange for supporting three male staff members’ promotions. The charges against her, the Chief maintains, are an attempt to tarnish her reputation and get her sacked.

Pinky is Rik Dudek’s unconventional private investigator with a drug-fueled history and anail through her nose. Rik’s isn’t quite in the same league as Pinky’s lawyer grandfather until the Chief Lucia Gomez’s high profile case comes along.

Just as the case attracts Rik’s and then Pinky’s attention, an intriguing neighbor, Koob, moves into Pinky’s building. Being a work in progress private investigator, Pinky sees the unusually secretive Koob as a worthy subject for investigation and eventually she makes a link between him and ‘The Ritz’, the town’s top-level property tycoon, crook, drug-dealer, ex-cop, and ex-partner of Lucy Gomez.

Lucy Gomez’ trial proceeds and two of the three litigants are exposed as liars. The third though, Blanco, proves more resilient to cross-examination and the evidence linking him to Lucy, a lurid photo, is compelling. The case suddenly collapses when Blanco’s dead body is found in a near-empty apartment. Pinky is allowed in on the case because she has gathered damning information from Koob against The Ritz. As the FBI move in on The Ritz, Lucy Gomez goes missing. And because this is a suspense as well as a thriller, I should stop there.

I’ve enjoyed all of Turow’s books so far and this one did not disappoint although at times I thought there was too much ‘Pinky introspection’ and perhaps luck/intuition played too great a part in the investigation meaning the reader was less capable of beating the writer to the end. Nonetheless the story was well constructed and well written, the main characters were reasonably well developed and their relationships were suitably inter-twined to generate some intrigue. The high-tempo ending was certainly satisfying.