Books like Pleading Guilty

I really did try to read this terrible book. I have a rule, I can't remember whether it's the 50-page rule or the 100-page rule, but the point is, it's a rule, and I live by it: reach that page and you are committed, like the Clintons' marriage. You do not abandon ship! So for me to drop this book at p. 154 should tell you something. What it should tell you is that I had reached the point in the book where the potbellied, 50-something blue-collar lawyer Mack has gone to the apartment of his hostile black law firm colleague Glyndora, who has very reluctantly let him in, after a few minutes he has placed his hands on her nipples, felt an enormous sexual charge, he runs out to buy Seagram's and condoms, and when he gets back to her apartment she won't let him in. Which I was elated about, as I could not have endured a sex scene between them at that or any other point.I dearly love a good police procedural, so clearly I have nothing against the police, or their procedures. But it's impossible to overstate how much I hate writing like this. I'm not a fan of the hardboiled or noir, and this is just ridiculous:"She was pointing out the features of her inner sanctum and I, the former sot who'd done more wandering than a minstrel, was at home conducting a perverse and private romance with Mary Fivefingers.""Glyndora is past forty and showing little wear. This is one good-looking woman and she knows it - built like the brick shithouse you've always heard about, five foot ten in her stocking feet and female every inch of it, a phenomenal set of headlights, a big black fanny, and a proud imperial face, with a majestic look and an aquiline schnozzola that reports on Semitic adventures in West Africa centuries ago."For every sentence like this Turow should be sentenced to 20 hours of community service, perhaps scrubbing the shit out of brick shithouses, or representing me pro bono when I punch him in the face.