
DEBUT Smith, a barrister and King’s Counsel in London’s Inner Temple, makes her fiction debut with an Edwardian-set cozy. Snuggled into the privileged surrounds of the lofty Inner Temple (much like the hallowed halls of Oxford or Cambridge) lives barrister Sir Gabriel Ward KC. He is a precise man who presses on the door three times whenever he closes it. One morning he opens his door, his mind full of case law, and stumbles over the body of the Lord Chief Justice of England. Suddenly Gabriel’s ordered world is disrupted, and he is charged by the Inner Temple’s treasurer to find the killer. Smith braids Gabriel’s daily tasks as a barrister—working on a fraudulent-authorship case about a children’s book featuring a mouse who lives in the Temple church—with the new work of finding who committed murder in the Temple. In slow, acute, and deeply satisfying reveals, Gabriel decants both cases, peeling back the secrets of his fellow lawyers and highlighting courtroom drama, social injustice, family dynamics, and the lives of servants and the served.
VERDICT Smith’s novel is a quiet triumph. Each small unfolding supports the next, characters blossom off the page, and the pitch-perfect pacing is as pleasurable as the descriptive detail.
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