A CASE OF LIFE AND LIMB

Sir Gabriel Ward’s second unofficial encounter with murder in London’s Inner Temple begins with several limbs before claiming any lives.

As 1901 passes into 1902, someone is marking the change by sending body parts with cheeky notes to barristers who live in London’s inner sanctum. Sir William Waring, Master Treasurer and head of the Inner Temple, receives the first note—“Can I give you a hand?” paired with an appropriate parcel. Publicity hound Sir Edward Hopkins gets “Don’t put your foot in it” and a skeletal foot. But the third delivery—“A word in your ear”—claims a living victim in Reverend Master Hugh Vernon-Osbert, of the Temple Church, who suffers a fatal heart attack in response. Gabriel, meanwhile, has been sought out by Topsy Tillotson, a chorus girl turned musical star, to prosecute her libel case against Lionel Sullivan’s scruffy tabloid Nation’s Voice, which has announced that she’s surrendered her virtue to the Hon. Frederick Sewell, a man-about-town she claims she’s never met. Gabriel will work once more with PC Maurice Wright on both cases, linking one of them to a 10-year-old murder, as all parties, especially Gabriel himself, strive to keep their upper lips stiff. The setting, the characters, the tone, and the methodical dispersal of clues to the sins the stuffy cast is hiding are well up to the high bar of Gabriel’s debut in A Case of Mice and Murder (2025); only the final unmasking of the eminently predictable killer falls short.

Sedate legal thrills set in allegedly quieter times and quarters that can still deliver unseemly jolts.