Everything is going well for Arthur Beauchamp in his early middle age. Life is so good for the top-notch defence lawyer that, in a moment of career restlessness, he decides to switch sides, just the once, and prosecute a young man charged with murdering a clown. Beauchamp is confident he can prove Randolph Skyler is guilty. Confident, but still worried and surprisingly blind to how precarious the evidence is
and, worse, to the fissures opening in his personal life.

It’s a case Beauchamp will never forget, not even years later, when he’s happily remarried and retired to a bucolic life on Garibaldi Island in the glorious Salish Sea. As Beauchamp is about to learn, the older you get, the greater the chance is that the past will come back to bite you. In Deverell’s latest marvel in his Beauchamp series, Arthur has causes aplenty to sing a worried song.