To The Last Page

Realising that she doesn’t have long left to live, court prosecutor Elizabeth Glendenning leaves behind the work she has accumulated on a particular case in a safe deposit box, entrusting a key with her former deputy, Anselm Duffy, who has since left the court service to become a monk. The case that has occupied the attentions of Elizabeth is an old one, a seemingly minor case that some tenants brought against their landlord, Graham Riley. Elizabeth’s defence of Riley’s case was successful, but the acquittal of her client has had some serious repercussions in the subsequent years, and Elizabeth’s conscience makes her is determined to make amends. Her death leaves the case in the hands of her son Nick and Anselm, with only a few posthumous letters and the testimony of Blind George – a homeless man with no short-term memory – the only clues to unravelling the mystery of Riley and the Pieman. I haven’t read Brodrick’s previous novel The Sixth Lamentation  and I don’t put much stock by the