'Ordinary Heroes'
by Scott Turow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25
Scott Turow, best known for his courtroom thrillers, takes a sharp detour in his new novel, "Ordinary Heroes." Rather than the typical murder potboiler, Turow offers a complex World War II novel, loosely based on his own father's wartime experiences.
Famous for his fast-paced murder mysteries with shocking last-minute plot twists and thoughtful narratives, Turow instead offers a sentimental and ill-conceived war novel.
"Ordinary Heroes" traces the efforts of Stewart Dubinsky, a lawyer featured in Turow's earlier works, as he tries to reconstruct his deceased father's wartime activities.
Like many a baby boomer sorting through the long-forgotten letters and records of his parents, Turow uncovers secrets from the past, in this case a collection of love letters that reveal his father's previously unknown court martial and imprisonment.
Dubinsky tracks down the JAG corps lawyer who defended his father, Barrington Leach, now ailing in a nursing home. Improbably, however, Leach still possesses a copy of the records from the court martial.
This alone is enough to make the reader scratch his or her head and wonder what Turow was thinking. Most nursing-home occupants are lucky to keep their own toilet kit, much less obscure legal records from 50 years ago.
In any event, the records contain a handwritten account, by Dubinsky's father, in which he describes for his lawyer's benefit the events leading up to his court martial. The account begins as Leach is given the assignment to travel the front lines during the Battle of the Bulge in northern France in search of an OSS officer named Robert Martin.
Martin operated behind the lines, working closely with the French Resistance, but was resented and suspected of treasonous cooperation with the Soviets by General Teedle - a cartoonish and, frankly, clich
