When Venetia Aldridge, QC, defends young Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, this for her is just one more case, one more opportunity to triumph in a distinguished career as a criminal lawyer. But Regina v. Ashe sets in motion a chain of events as terrifying as they are unpredictable. And when, four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead at her desk in her Middle Temple chambers, a blood-splashed wig on her head, Dalgliesh and his team are called in to a case which promises to be as sensitive as it is intriguing. Who hated Miss Aldridge enough to kill her? Her lover? Her ex-husband? An aggrieved client? A colleague or one of the staff in chambers? Someone who hated the lawyer as much as he feared the woman? And then, at a crucial point in the investigation, one of the small group of suspects is found with a severed throat in a welter of blood, and with this second murder the case spins into fresh complexities of horror.