A drive-by shooting of an aging white woman at a gang-plagued Kindle County housing project sets in motion Scott Turow's intensely absorbing novel, The Laws of our Fathers.

Mile's trial is presided over—and narrated by—Judge Sonia "Sonny" Klonsky, whom Turow's fans will remember from his second novel, The Burden of Proof. It brings together a vivid cast of characters from Sonny's student years during the turbulent sixties, among them Nile's father, Loyell Eddgar, once a leading campus revolutionary, and Sonny's old boyfriend Seth Weissman, who is now a renowned journalist. All have been permanently marked by the heady iconoclasm of their youth; some carry terrible secrets that come to bear on the case at hand in unforeseeable and explosive ways.