‘Can You Forgiver Me?’ : THE BURDEN OF PROOF <i> by Scott Turow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22.95; 756 pp.; 0-374-11734-9) </i>

No one on the contemporary scene writes better mystery-suspense novels than Chicago attorney Scott Turow.

In a genre overcrowded with transparent plots and one-dimensional supersleuths, Turow’s first novel, “Presumed Innocent,” was a work of serious fiction as well as a gripping tale of murder and courtroom drama. The book also brought Turow uncommon commercial success, netting 44 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, plus the sale of movie rights to Warner Brothers for a major motion picture to be released later this year.

Turow’s second novel, “The Burden of Proof,” is destined to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps. Like the earlier story, this one unfolds in Kindle County, a hypothetical venue in the Midwest animated by big-city machine politics and filled with high-profile criminal prosecutions.

The protagonist is a 56-year-old Argentine-born defense attorney, Alejandro (Sandy) Stern, a man whose forensic skills, Old World charm and unimpeachable ethics have made him one of Kindle’s most prominent trial attorneys. Readers of “Presumed Innocent” will remember Stern as the counsel who masterminded the celebrated defense of Rusty Sabich, the Kindle prosecutor accused of killing a female colleague.

When we last encountered him, Stern was basking in the glory of that triumph, at the pinnacle of a storied career. It is now three years later, and it is a more subdued and introspective Stern whom we meet, his life in turmoil as a result of his wife Clara’s suicide. Returning home one afternoon, absorbed in lawyerly abstractions about yet another big-name client--his womanizing brother-in-law, Dixon Hartnell, whose brokerage firm is under investigation by the Justice Department for illegal trading-- Stern finds Clara dead in her car from carbon monoxide poisoning. All that is left of their 30-year marriage is a one-sentence note that asks: “Can you forgive me?”

With Stern’s personal crisis as the fulcrum, the story subdivides into two interrelated mysteries, as Stern struggles to discover why Clara took her life and why the Feds are so obsessed with corralling Dixon. The night before Clara’s funeral, Stern comes across the first clue in a neglected pile of unopened mail--a bill from a local medical laboratory for a blood test performed on his wife.

Was Clara suffering from some unspeakable disease? Had one of her periodic black moods slipped unnoticed into terminal depression? Stern’s suspicions deepen and turn to anger as he learns that Clara’s ample estate is short $850,000 following a bank withdrawal made five days before her death. All that Clara’s bank can report is that she removed the money by means of a certified check made payable to an unidentified man.

At the same time, the investigation into Dixon’s shady financial empire moves relentlessly forward, demanding all the attention that the suddenly widowed Stern can muster. When Dixon is served with a grand-jury subpoena directing him to produce company records on several large transactions, Stern detects the presence of an informant. Rather than help his own cause, however, Dixon feigns disinterest, insisting only that Stern accept custody of a safe containing important “personal” papers.

Stern’s efforts to get to the bottom of the federal probe lead him to Margy Allison, Dixon’s chief of operations from the company’s Chicago headquarters, a self-made “businessswoman vamp” with an Oklahoma twang in her voice and a memory for facts and figures like an IBM PC. With Margy’s assistance, Stern confirms that the suspicious trades, all involving commodity-futures purchases for institutional customers, fall into an ingenious illegal scheme known as “trading ahead”:

Prior to each of the institutional trades, someone at Dixon’s firm has bought the same commodity while market prices are low. Following the institutional buys, after prices have climbed, the first position is cashed out at a handsome rate of profit. In order to conceal the illegal transactions, they are recorded in the perfect hiding place, the firm’s “house-error” account, where mishandled purchase orders are funneled daily and quickly corrected.

The intricacies of the unfolding story line are matched word for word by the depth of Turow’s characters. One of Turow’s great strengths as a writer is that even relatively minor players like Margy are portrayed as well-developed personalities, with unique personal histories, individualized sensibilities and annoying idiosyncrasies.

Stern’s character is especially well crafted. The antithesis of the typical hero, Stern is short, pudgy, bald and altogether inexperienced about life outside the courtroom. A virgin when he met Clara, and faithful to her throughout their marriage, he has his first sexual encounter with another woman, 40 days after Clara’s suicide, in an unexpected interlude with Margy in a Chicago hotel. A later, a more serious affair with a divorced friend further arouses Stern’s dormant sexuality, but he remains a novice in matters of passion.

Reprising age-old themes of Jewish alienation, Stern is a perpetual outsider in American culture, having immigrated to Chicago at age 13, much as his father, a German physician, settled in Argentina a decade before World War II. Instructed to “speak the English of an Eton schoolboy” in his homeland, he has never mastered the idioms of everyday life in America and converses in pristine prose without the use of any contractions.

Painfully aware of his personal shortcomings, Stern finds himself continually reflecting on his inability to notice Clara’s suffering until it was too late. Similarly, his deficiencies as a father are evident in his relations with his three children, particularly with estranged son Peter, a doctor and his mother’s favorite, whom Stern suspects of holding back information on the causes of the suicide.

A former assistant U.S. attorney himself, Turow develops the inherent tensions and gamesmanship between prosecution and defense with dispatch and precision. On balance, however, he displays a decidedly anti-prosecution bias, as illustrated by Stern’s musings during a court appearance that the zealous federal attorneys that he encountered “were like cigar-store Indians to many of the judges: fungible young functionaries routinely clamoring for justice.” To Stern, by contrast, the law is often “a nasty business” concerned with governing “misfortune, the slights and injuries of our social existence that were otherwise wholly random. The law’s object was to let the seas engulf only those who had been selected for drowning on an orderly basis.”

another suggested trim:

Stern discovers that Clara’s blood test was for genital herpes, a condition that his next-door neighbor, Dr. Nate Cawley, had been treating unbeknownst to Stern. Was Nate, whose own marriage is on the rocks, Clara’s lover? Had Clara given him the $850,000 to help with his impending divorce settlement? The evidence, including Nate’s evasiveness and the fact that Stern finds a prescription in Nate’s name for the anti-herpes drug, acyclovir, is highly suspicious.

The evidence is also highly suggestive of Dixon’s guilt, as Stern learns that each of the illegal trades was cashed out of the house-error account into holdings registered to an entity called Wunderkind Associates. When Margy Allison is unable to find the signature cards for the Wunderkind account, the presence of the informer is felt again as Klonsky subpoenas Stern to produce Dixon’s safe before the grand jury. The only trouble is, the safe has disappeared from Stern’s office.

If all this seems like an early indictment of Dr. Cawley and Dixon, rest assured--the real mystery is just beginning. Unearthing the identity of the informant and the secrets behind Clara’s death and the Wunderkind conspiracy will demand all of Stern’s intellectual acumen. It will also entail a series of dramatic confrontations with family members that will force Stern to choose between the literal commands of the law and the needs of the people closest to him.

Although some may find the final resolution a trifle contrived, the outstanding merit of this book lies not so much in how it unwinds as in the ultimate message it resonates--that in life and in law, there is always moral ambiguity; that it is people, not abstract principles, who matter most, and that carefree happy endings are nothing if not improbable.