Long Winding Road : THE LAWS OF OUR FATHERS.<i> By Scott Turow (Farrar Straus & Giroux: $26.95, 534 pp.)</i>

The tension and violence on America’s big-city streets erupts in semiautomatic weapon fire to launch “The Laws of Our Fathers,” Scott Turow’s gripping new novel. A white senator’s ex-wife and a black teenage street whore are left sprawled like the detritus of the night on bloodied pavement at dawn. The two have nothing, and everything, in common. The bullets that cut them down are echoes of a past generation, recalling protest bombings, tear gas barrages and the antiwar and civil rights chants heard 25 years earlier.

Some critics bitched and moaned that Turow’s subsequent bestsellers, “The Burden of Proof” and “Pleading Guilty,” failed to match the promise of his first novel, the darkly engrossing “Presumed Innocent,” nearly a decade ago. They can stop whining now. Sure, “Presumed Innocent,” with its intriguing murder mystery and its hero caught in a maelstrom of sexual obsession, was a tough act to follow. But “The Laws of Our Fathers” must be viewed as Turow’s most stunning achievement, and it is certainly his most ambitious effort.

This novel, too, is a legal thriller and murder mystery, but it also has missing people, old puzzles from the past, long-lost lovers reunited, old enemies unforgiven and most of all, history. Our own.

The scents of gunpowder, fear and the strange animal smell of spilled blood rise from the opening pages, then fade to the unmistakable bouquets of flowers, sweat and tear gas. Past and present, juxtaposed in alternating chapters, advance at breakneck speed; each conclusion is accompanied by dizzying twists.

We are back in fictional Kindle County, the setting of all Turow’s novels, a place that is in every way--physically, politically and geographically--like Chicago, where the author, a former federal prosecutor, is a law firm partner. Familiar faces from Turow’s earlier novels--the local politicos, lawyers and judges--reappear, aging, scheming, careers evolving. Among them is rumpled and politically beleaguered prosecutor Tommy Molto, first met in “Presumed Innocent,” and Sonia (Sonny) Klonsky, the pregnant assistant U.S. attorney from “The Burden of Proof.”

The book begins on Sept. 7, 1995, with a deadly drive-by shooting seen through the eyes, and told in the street speak, of a violent high-ranking gang member, street name Hardcore. Was it simply a drive-by or was it a setup? Premeditated murder? A contract hit? Nothing is as it seems. A shocking arrest is made.

Sonny is now her honor, Judge Sonia Klonsky. She is divorced, the mother of Nikki, who is almost 6, and a breast cancer survivor. The only men in the busy life of this lonely single mother are the wretched defendants brought before her, the cops who arrest them and the lawyers who defend and prosecute them. Into her courtroom falls this bombshell of a case. The woman murdered in the opening sequence is June Eddgar, the ex-wife of Sen. Loyell Eddgar.

To Sonny, the cast of characters assembling is more shocking than the shooting. As a student in California, she knew June Eddgar and her husband. Loyell Eddgar was a Maoist then, a charismatic radical professor committed to violence, and June was his wife and willing accomplice. Sonny and her boyfriend Seth Weissman, who was about to flee to Canada to avoid the draft, and Michael Frain, a quiet young neighbor, lived in the same building as the Eddgars. They even baby-sat the Eddgars’ oddly unlovable only child, a boy named Nile. The other member of their close-knit group was Seth’s boyhood best friend Hobie Tuttle, a flamboyant law student.

Sonny’s initial reaction is to disqualify herself from the case, but politics dictates otherwise. She has seen none of the principals in more than 20 years and the lawyers on both sides do not object. The defendant is June Eddgar’s own son, Nile, who has grown into an oddly unlovable man and who is more recently familiar to other judges in whose courtrooms he has testified as a probation officer.

The situation grows more disquieting as the stampeding press descends on the case. Among the journalists is Seth Weissman, the lover from Sonny’s youth, who is now a famous and successful columnist writing under the name Michael Frain. The fate of the real Frain is one of the many mysteries unresolved until the climactic chapters.

Another figure surfaces from those tumultuous times of demonstrations, FBI surveillance and drug experimentation: Hobie Tuttle, still imposing, still eloquent and now a highly successful and stylish showman of a defense attorney imported from out of state to represent Nile.

Old secrets surface as new ones are investigated.

Chapters swing between Kindle County today and California--in particular, the Bay Area, 1969-1970--and from the alternating viewpoints of Sonny and Seth, strong yet vulnerable characters wounded by life, love and their histories together and apart.

As Turow demonstrates so clearly, nearly all of us are haunted by, bound to and repulsed by our parents. These characters spent their youths fleeing theirs. Sonny’s single mother was a revolutionary, a labor organizer, impulsive, sometimes so engrossed in her ranting that she forgot her little daughter. Seth is the son of Holocaust survivors; his father, an economist focused only on money, refuses to speak of the terrible past. Even Sen. Eddgar, the once-radical professor, the sinister yet magnetic leader, burns with a need for violence ignited by the intolerant hypocrisy of his Southern preacher father. Everybody runs from their roots only to be drawn back by blood, genes and age, trying to come to terms with and reach back to their origins.

Can any of us, even nations, escape our own history? These idealists of the ‘60s and ‘70s who expended such efforts, took such risks and held such high hopes for the world, for peace, race relations and the future, are both horrified and heartened by the ‘90s.

The ending is absolutely satisfying. Turow is equally at home wading through the hot violent world of gangbangers as he is with tense courtroom realism and the hearts and minds of the not so stodgy middle-aged survivors of the colorful and chaotic ‘60s and ‘70s. His voices are true, his writing elegant.

The book ends on a note of hope, not only for the residents of Kindle County, but for all of us.

If “Presumed Innocent” was Turow’s big book of the ‘80s, this seething, panoramic book of interacting characters, historic events, politics, violence and love is his big book of the ‘90s. It will be another hard act to follow.

“The Laws of Our Fathers” is also available, abridged, on four audiocassettes from Simon & Schuster for $25.