A trial is rather like a play.
We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience.
And on a good day no-one gets murdered.

The hit play Daughters Of The Revolution has a stunning finale. The lead actress, Alexandra Dyce, masked, walks to the guillotine and is executed, her head clearly coming off. It’s a clever trick, involving a rotating disc and a dummy strapped into the mechanism under the stage which is beheaded. Only on one fateful performance, it wasn’t Alexandra who walked to the guillotine – because she was strapped in the place of the dummy…

KC Charles Konig is brought in to defend Leo Lusk, co-star and ex-husband of Alexandra, but he wasn’t the only person who had a motive. And it seems that finding the real killer is the only way for Konig to win the case, given that Lusk really isn’t helping his own defense…

Well, that was an interesting one. I’ve not read Guy Morpuss before, but I gathered he has a reputation for writing slightly weird crime fiction – time travel, multiple personalities, that sort of thing – so this seemed to be a departure. There is some stuff about genetics that caused me a bit of concern over where it was going, but for the most part, this plays out like a traditional murder mystery.

It did start a little slowly, and at one point I did put it down, but it’s to the book’s credit that I went back as I was curious as to what happened. I also wanted to read more about Charles and his co-counsel Yara Ortiz. There’s a clever move here, as given that she is from New York, Morpuss is able to contrast the UK and US court systems and explain to readers why things are happening this way in the court. The seveloping relationship between the two characters is very well done as well.

It has to be said, once one thing happens, the murderer became somewhat inevitable to me, but I was still somewhat perplexed as to what exactly happened on the stage. It’s a clever solution, clever in its simplicity, but there is a question as to how what the perceived truth was had been accepted as surely doing a particular something would have been extremely difficult to achieve, something nobody questions.

Regardless, this is a very enjoyable read. Morpuss hasn’t done a series of books yet, but I have to say, I’d be very keen to read more of Charles and Yara.