The Inns of Court, London, 2018. Elliot Rook QC is one of the greatest barristers of his generation. An eccentric genius, equally admired and envied by his colleagues. A heavy-drinking, hard-talking man with a desert-dry wit and a passion for justice that burns within.
He is also a complete fraud.
Unbeknownst to the high society of the Inns of Court surrounding him, Rook is not the Old-Etonian, Oxfordian gentleman he pretends to be. In fact, he is an ex-petty criminal with a conviction of his own and a colourful, impoverished past that he has spent decades keeping secret.
Until now… The body of a young woman has been found on the outskirts of Rook’s home town of Cotgrave in Nottinghamshire. One man alone is suspected of the murder: Billy Barber; a football hooligan, criminal, white-supremacist and scourge of his community. And there is only one man whom Barber will allow to defend him: his old acquaintance Elliot Rook QC. If Rook doesn’t take the case, Barber will expose him and bring crashing to the ground the life and career that he has spent his life building.
Rook must now team up with Zara Barnes, a hijab-wearing, state-school-educated apprentice whom his snobbish legal counterparts have dismissed out of hand but in whom Rook sees a special talent.
Rook and Barnes travel back to Cotgrave, to the abandoned mines and dark recesses of Rook’s broken past, where they must unearth the killer, seek out justice, and save his life and career in the process. Along the way, they will encounter shadowy figures from Rook’s former life as well as new threats who will call into question everything that he believes to be true and everything he has fought for.
The truth is there for the finding, as Rook says. But at what cost?
Habeas Corpus is a compulsive, un-putdown-able thriller full of twists, turns, and razor-sharp intrigue for fans of Robert Galbraith and CJ Sansom, from an author whose own story is as remarkable as the character it has inspired.
