Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow
Published 1987 · 142,268 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime, Thriller & Suspense
How hard is Presumed Innocent to read?
Presumed Innocent scores 68 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Legal terminology, forensic vocabulary. Turow writes with a lawyer's precision and a novelist's range.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Literate prose, more polished than most legal thrillers. Turow writes genuine sentences, not just plot delivery.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Guilt, self-deception, and the gap between legal truth and actual truth. The legal system as moral theater.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Legal proceedings, forensic evidence, political machinations, and personal psychology. Dense and precise.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- Rusty's first-person narration may be unreliable. The reader can't be sure what he's concealing.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The courtroom as theater. Presumption of innocence as legal and moral concept. Relatively naturalistic.
- Ironic distance: 75 out of 100
- Rusty's narration creates dramatic irony—the reader suspects what Rusty may be hiding.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- The trial concludes. The twist ending provides resolution, but its moral implications linger.
- Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
- First-person narration structured around the trial. Past and present interleave.
How Presumed Innocent is regarded
Presumed Innocent holds a literary regard score of 33 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.