Ordinary, yes, and far from heroic

"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, clichéd character drawn by Turow who not only holds far-right-wing views but is quietly suspected of homosexual assaults on his own troops.

Martin, by contrast, is a devil- may-care, dashing officer accompanied by a beautiful French woman who is by turns angry, proud and defiant as they engage in daring acts of sabotage. Not hard to identify the bad guy here; the only thing that's missing is the Snidely Whiplash mustache.

In one of the more dramatic scenes, Martin and his compatriots commandeer a supply train, overcome its guards and drive it directly into an enormous (but apparently loosely guarded) ammunition dump, causing a spectacular explosion of the entire ammunition supply, the death of the German troops stationed there and the destruction of the supply train itself — all without any loss of life or even injury to Martin and his co-conspirators.

Even though the explosion can be heard from miles away, Martin and his band of fighters throw a huge celebratory dinner afterward. Some "secret operation."

Dubinsky's father predictably falls in love with the young French woman, a plot development that is painfully obvious from her first appearance. He suffers a sharp conflict between his obligations to his country and his desire for the girl, and ultimately ends up charged with failing his duty to arrest Martin.

The entire misadventure mercifully slouches to a halt with an effort to reveal a plot twist at the end, which is used to justify the ponderous development of the various relationships. It is, unfortunately, not much of a "twist" on top of not much of a "plot."

For a writer of such first-rate potential, this is a disappointing and maudlin effort. Like Elvis in Vegas, he's done better work elsewhere.

Kevin J. Hamilton is a Seattle lawyer.