Since publishing the highly regarded bestseller Presumed Innocent in 1987, author Scott Turow has been crowned the default king of the legal procedural. In literary circles, that's damning him with faint praise, given the glut of lawyers who've become beach-and-airplane-book stylists. While the John Grishams of the world live and die on the strength of their twisty mechanics, it's a testament to Turow's considerable empathy and range that his latest novel, Reversible Errors, resonates in unexpected ways even though its plot largely betrays him. As the title suggests, regret and redemption are running themes, informed by decade-old events that still reverberate through the characters' lives as if they'd happened yesterday. In Turow's dovetailing storylines, which volley fluidly from 1991 to the present, old rivalries are renewed, scabbed wounds are reopened, and several condemned men and women suddenly face a critical juncture between salvation and extinction. Personal histories carry an unusually heavy weight in Reversible Errors, especially for Arthur Raven, a 38-year-old business attorney whose court-ordered assignment to a pro bono capital murder case unites him with an unlikely figure from his past and resuscitates his long-suffocated idealism. Still single with no prospects and no family (other than a burdensome schizophrenic sister), Raven immerses himself in the final appeal for Rommy Gandolph, a death-row inmate six weeks away from execution for a triple homicide at a local diner. When a fellow inmate's startling confession breathes new life into Gandolph's case, Raven turns to original judge Gillian Sullivan, who was grappling with a secret heroin addition during the original trial, and has since served out a prison sentence for taking bribes. As these wounded souls are drawn closer to each other, old feelings of bitterness and affection are stirred up across the aisle, where ace prosecutor Muriel Wynn and detective Larry Starczek bat down the new revelations in the case while sifting through the wreckage of their own passionate affair. Though they're on opposite sides, Raven and Wynn are dealing with similarly complicated relationship issues with figures crucial to their respective sides of the case, and whose credibility is questionable: Starczek may have coerced a confession out of a man with an IQ of 73, and Sullivan might have sentenced Gandolph while under the influence. Eventually, the intrigue between these two pairs overwhelms the lethargic turns of the case, which trudges knee-deep through a convoluted airport scam involving stolen tickets, drug-running, and a gang of unsavory characters. Turow recovers his wits in time for a gripping finale, but the whodunit remains the least compelling element of Reversible Errors, which instead thrives on the knotty psychology that binds its deeply flawed characters together. In Turow's legal universe, justice is only as clear as the complex people who administer it.