Readers of Scott Turow’s engrossing 1987 novel, “Presumed Innocent,” will be startled to learn that in the sequel to that thriller, his hero, Rusty Sabich, now 60, is still married to Barbara, his volatile, unhappy wife, and that he’s now the chief judge of the State Court of Appeals.  It’s been 22 years since Rusty went on trial for the twisted murder of his lover and colleague Carolyn Polhemus, and since then, we’re told, he’s settled back into his stilted marriage with a mixture of resignation and detachment. In “Innocent” Mr. Turow asks us to believe that when Barbara learned she had bipolar disorder, Rusty decided to let bygones be bygones and return to the life they’d had before the Polhemus trial. So what if Barbara played a diabolical role in that case? So what if Rusty is haunted and unhappy? It’s for the best, he tells himself, for their emotionally fragile son, Nat.  This mise-en-scène will doubtless strike readers of “Presumed Innocent” — or viewers of the 1990 movie version starring Harrison Ford — as improbable to say the least. It’s nearly as far fetched as a screenwriter, assigned to do a sequel to “Fatal Attraction,” starting off the new script with the Michael Douglas and Glenn Close characters back together again.  If readers can accept this dubious opening premise, however, Mr. Turow does manage to turn the remainder of the novel into a fast and absorbing ride. There are some other implausible developments along the way. But his intimate understanding of his characters and his authoritative knowledge of the legal world inject the narrative with emotional fuel, creating suspense that has less to do with the actual twists and turns of the plot than with our interest in what will happen to these people and how they will behave under pressure.  “Innocent” opens with the shocking scene of Rusty sitting on his bed next to Barbara, who is dead; Rusty will inexplicably sit there for the next 24 hours before calling his son or the police. The initial report says Barbara died of heart failure as a result of arrhythmia and possible high blood pressure, but Rusty’s old adversary, Tommy Molto, now acting prosecuting attorney, is looking into her death, egged on by his zealous chief deputy, Jim Brand. Rusty, they suspect, was having an affair and might have murdered his wife rather than go through a messy divorce.  Cutting back and forth in time and among characters’ points of view, Mr. Turow constructs two story lines that dovetail with implacable momentum: one involves the events leading to Barbara’s death; the other recounts what constitutes a terrible case of déjà vu for Rusty — another murder trial in which he is once again defended by the brilliant Sandy Stern.  Rusty vowed after the first trial to live on the straight and narrow. He says he realized that his affair with Carolyn Polhemus — that “lone mad, compulsive detour into the pure excesses of pleasure” — had led him to be accused of murder and that he now feels he must “show some gratitude to whatever force allowed me to skate across the thinnest ice and make it.” And yet, his cold, sullen marriage to Barbara and his 60th birthday have made him yearn for “the unnamable piece of happiness” that has eluded him his entire life. He wants to throw off the dutiful restraint on which he’s staked his life — as the injured son of an angry father, and as the patient, put-upon husband of a demanding, irrational woman. So when his former clerk Anna starts flirting with him, he begins a passionate affair with her and finds himself unexpectedly falling in love.  Meanwhile, months after Barbara dies, Molto and Brand find clues that make them suspect that Barbara’s death was not a natural one — clues that point to Rusty as the one who might have slipped her an overdose of medication. Though their evidence is circumstantial, a confluence of events and witness testimony will help them build a persuasive case.  Mr. Turow has always had a taste for incestuous plots in which coincidences (and contrivances) abound, and everyone seems to have a secret relationship with everyone else, and this novel is no exception. We learn that shortly after a conscience-stricken Rusty abruptly broke things off with Anna, his 28-year-old son — unaware of his father’s affair — began pursuing Anna himself. She resists Nat at first, but soon tumbles into a relationship, and it’s not long before they are living together. The night before Barbara’s death, the young couple join Rusty and Barbara for an awkward dinner at the older couple’s house. Anna is nervous because she suspects that Barbara has gone through Rusty’s computer and knows about her earlier relationship with Rusty.  Unlike its predecessor, “Innocent” does not open out into a capacious, Tom Wolfe-ian look at how the justice system is intertwined with politics and municipal corruption. But Mr. Turow does use his easy familiarity with the legal world to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how that realm operates day to day — from the stratagems employed by prosecutors and defense attorneys to orchestrate evidence to the random, lucky or unlucky events that may shape the outcome of a trial.  Rusty’s second trial — which takes up the better half of this novel — proves to be just as suspenseful and gripping as his first. Suffice it to say that the fans of “Presumed Innocent” who can suspend their disbelief for the first couple of chapters of this follow-up will not be disappointed.  InnocentBy Scott Turow406 pages.Grand Central Publishing.$27.99.
In Scott Turowâs new novel, a sequel to âPresumed Innocent,â Rusty Sabich finds himself again at the center of a complex trial.