The Trials of Lila Dalton

August 1, 2024
A practicing barrister's first novel presents a junior barrister who's beset by a mind-boggling series of obstacles when she's suddenly called to defend an accused bomber. Start with the fact that there's a formidable body of evidence that Jonathan Eades planted four bombs that killed 27 people and injured more than a hundred in Abbott House, a Home Office building on Assumption Island, on the 50th anniversary of Heinrich Himmler's suicide. Eades associates himself with the far-far-right group O87, which espouses violence in the name of purifying the race, and he was seen by one witness who thought his behavior suspicious and by several others as he was fleeing the scene. A more immediate problem for Lila Dalton--who's assigned to defend him after her senior colleague Pat Singh, the Queen's Counsel who'd originally taken the case, is seriously injured in a car accident--is that she can't remember anything about Eades, or the bombing, or even herself when she suddenly "look[s] up to find twelve strangers staring back at [her]." Lila gradually realizes what her name is, and where she is, but even those details come across as new information, not memories. Luckily, she seems to have some muscle memory of how to conduct herself in a courtroom, and she scores points against an improbable number of witnesses whom wily prosecutor Alasdair Paxton calls to testify. But how is she to cope with the presiding judge's sexual advances toward her, or the anonymous message that commands her, "Get him off or you'll never see her again," or the phantom presences that pop up around her, or her own arrest for murder? Though the answers to these questions are even more far-fetched than the questions, it's abundantly worth plowing forward even if you end up disappointed. A striking debut that will leave readers hungry for more nightmare tales from its author's fertile imagination.

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