Bloomsbury
Published November 18, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Sir Gabriel Ward, Kings Counsel, is an eccentric but gifted barrister living and working in the ancient Inner Temple of London. On Christmas eve of 1901, the Master Treasurer of the legal institution looks out his window to see him engaging in a snowball fight with boys (and rewarding one with damages of sixpence after hitting his target). It’s annoying: Sir Gabriel doesn’t behave like the other lawyers. He’s an oddball, rarely leaving the surrounding walls of the Temple and obsessively avoiding stepping on cracks between paving stones, even if he is brilliant at trial. But when a box is delivered to his office with a shocking present inside – a mummified severed hand, accompanied by a note reading “can I give you a hand?” – it is Gabriel who comes to his aid. Who sent the gruesome gift? What was the intended message? And whose body does the hand belong to?
Gabriel, aided by Constable Wright of the City of London police who joins in the investigation when off duty, begins to evaluate suspects, a task complicated as more body parts are delivered to other officers of the Temple. It seems the target isn’t the Treasurer, it’s the Temple itself. While seeking clues, Gabriel compiles a list of people who vanished over the years, and one by one he and learns their fates, trying by process of elimination to discover the source of the unsettling gifts.
At the same time, he’s preparing for a major trial. A popular music hall star, Topsy Tillotson, has sued a sensationalist newspaper for libel for alleging she had surrendered her virtue in a cab to the Honorable Frederick Sewell, who took a bet to see if he could overcome the defenses of the legendarily “unconquerable” star. Gabriel is reluctant to take on a sensational case, but the legal issues intrigue him and he is taken by Topsy’s belief in the law. He will go up against one of his colleagues, representing the newspaper, and against public opinion which assumes women like Topsy are sexually available and that men like her accuser, a well-connected wealthy young man about town, are naturally allowed to take advantage.
This delightful legal mystery, the second in the series following A Case of Mice and Murder (2025) is both cozy and intelligent. The author, like her hero, is a KC in the Inner Temple, and has used the unusual setting and its historic peculiarities to excellent effect. (In an afterword, she explains how one of the setting’s features that might seem an implausible invention was historically accurate, rediscovered during the London Blitz.) Moreover, the style she writes in is charmingly old-fashioned, and her protagonist is not burdened with excessive backstory, but is interesting, with traits that would be called “neurodivergent” these days, though his contemporaries would likely call him “peculiar.” The plot is unfolded with skill and brisk pacing, and if seasoned mystery readers won’t be entirely surprised by the solution, they will enjoy following along as Gabriel assembles clues and defends his spirited young plaintiff in court.