Crimes of The Heart

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE BURDEN OF PROOF by Scott Turow

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 515 pages; $22.95

Why did Clara Stern, wife of the distinguished trial lawyer Alejandro Stern, back her Seville into the garage, close the door and start the engine? Who was supposed to cash the $850,000 check she left with her banker before she took her life? How did this reticent Midwestern matron contract genital herpes? And what is the connection between her death and the Government's investigation of Maison Dixon, a commodity-futures firm owned by her brother-in-law Dixon Hartnell?

Readers of Scott Turow's previous blockbuster, Presumed Innocent, will know better than to hold their breath for answers. Turow, a lawyer who has kept jurors as well as readers on the edge of their chairs, has a preternatural knack for drawing out the suspense. The gimmick in Presumed Innocent was to follow the mystery through the eyes of the accused murderer, Rusty Sabich, a public prosecutor on trial for the murder of an amorous colleague. The intimate narrative device ensured reader sympathy, even though Sabich waited until the final pages to tell all he knew about the corpus delectable.

The Burden of Proof has no such fatal attraction. It does, however, bring back Stern, and it shares the earlier novel's preoccupation with two of civilization's fundamental institutions: the law and the family. It is no coincidence that the heroes of both books are attorneys who discover that justice is not blind when it gets too close to home.

Like Prospero, Stern is a magician who confronts unruly influences in a brave new world. The Midwestern Caliban is played by Hartnell, husband of Stern's sister and his most troublesome client -- a "small-town boy made good, gone bad." To see him on the floor of the commodity exchange is to observe a force of nature: "He stepped into the tiered levels of the pits, shaking hands and tossing greetings like Frank Sinatra onstage, commanding the same reverence, or, in some quarters, subverted loathing." When he admits, "I've always wanted to do what other people wouldn't," Stern replies coolly, "I believe that is called evil, Dixon."

Evil? What an old-fashioned notion that is in an America where the seven deadly sins are taken about as seriously as the Seven Dwarfs. But then Stern, whose Jewish parents fled to Argentina to avoid persecution in Europe, has learned "the gloomy lessons of foreign experience." Although he is known as Sandy in the U.S. -- his home since 1947 -- Stern remains a melancholy outsider with strong immigrant convictions. "No person Argentine by birth, a Jew alive to hear of the Holocaust could march in the jackboots of authority without intense self-doubt; better to keep his voice among the voices, to speak out daily for these frail liberties, so misunderstood, whose existence, far more than any prosecution, marked us all as decent, civilized, as human."

Stern is a sociological immigrant as well. A recent widower, he repeatedly finds himself in situations where he must adjust to new customs. Sensitivity, he discovers, is outmoded. His physician son Peter sounds like an Army medic when he tells his father to drop his drawers during a urological examination. Daughter Marta, a lawyer, does not ask permission when she moves in to help with the Maison Dixon case. Women have changed in other ways. They are eager to introduce him to tricky bedroom maneuvers. "Did you like that?" asks one. "The wings of a dove," is Stern's courtly answer.

There is even a quasi romance with his adversary, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sonia ("Sonny") Klonsky, an admirable model of today's busy woman. In addition to a grueling office schedule, she has to deal with an unhappy marriage, an advanced pregnancy and the possibility of recurrent breast cancer. Turow puts Sandy and Sonny in a hot tub together. But the bubbly alchemy is less convincing than their professional chemistry. Exchanges about subpoenas and fiduciary relationships resound with the authority of a judge's gavel. Clear explanations of how dishonest brokers and floor traders operate should add to the damage-control problems at the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

As an entertainment that blends the sublime with the slightly ridiculous, The Burden of Proof need not undergo strenuous cross-examination. It is a good story well told. Its characters are substantial, and its underlying theme of family has been central to the popular novel from War and Peace to The * Godfather. So here is a forecast you can't refuse: this summer, readers from Montauk to Maui will be turning the pages of Turow's book fast enough to air- condition the country.