Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith (Marshall Hall) delivers an affable if verbose series launch set in 1901 London's Inner Temple, home to distinguished judges and barristers. Sir Gabriel Ward KC, a neurodivergent barrister, strictly adheres to his daily routine--so much so that he barely notices a barefoot corpse lying at the front entrance of his chambers. The victim is Lord Chief Justice Norman Dunning, who was stabbed with a carving knife. Sir William Waring, master treasurer and head of the Inner Temple, is wary of outside police probing their community, so he assigns the investigation to Ward. Though Ward would rather focus on defending publisher Herbert Moore in a dispute over the true authorship of children's bestseller Millie the Temple Church Mouse, he reluctantly launches his inquiry. Alongside London police constable Maurice Wright, Ward interviews a wide array of people: servants, an ex-convict, the Temple Church's minister, Dunning's family, and potential candidates for the new Lord Chief Justice. Though at times the large cast and Smith's fondness for the language of the period saps the plot of momentum, readers will admire Sir Gabriel's wit and the tender partnership he develops with Constable Wright. This series is off to a promising start. Agent: Anne-Marie Doulton, Ampersand. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
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.--Neal Wyatt
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