Sam Foundling is one of England's rising sculptors, the happy father of an infant and the loving husband of a good woman, the daughter of judge Gina Mayford. His childhood was bleak - abandoned as a baby, raised by the state, fostered at age 12 - and he is both insecure and subject to rages, primarily directed toward himself. When he receives letters from a woman imprisoned in Holloway jail who states she's his birth mother, he turns to solicitor Trish Maguire, based on his memory of her as the only person who ever helped him when he was a child, a memory tarnished when he learns she doesn't remember representing him some twenty years earlier. When Sam discovers his wife's battered and bloody body in his studio, he is devastated. When he is arrested and charged with her murder, he turns to Trish again, certain she'll not fail him in either uncovering his innocence or in caring for his daughter while he's incarcerated.
Defending Sam is far from easy - Trish liked Cecelia, who she met only weeks before her delivery, in one of the biggest cases of both their careers, and she has worked with Gina, a woman grieving for her daughter and trying to trust the man who may have been her killer. In any case Sam caused Cecelia a lot of pain - she wouldn't speak about it, but Gina saw her after their arguments, and her son-in-law has never been an easy person to get along with.
One of the things I enjoy about Cooper's novels is her strong female characters - well developed, complex and active in their lives, Cooper has put significant effort not only into her serial protagonist Trish, but into developing single mother Gina, who raised a child alone against impossible odds while creating a legal career, and Cecelia, a loss adjustor with intelligence and integrity who was troubled by the prevalence of coincidence around her in the weeks prior to her murder.
In some way coincidence is also a character in the novel - many of the characters have incidental, preexisting relationships before crossing in the murder case, a fact that is explicitly commented on and which mercifully doesn't culminate in a deux ex machina ending. The ending is satisfying and believable, and the ongoing evolution of Trish's relationships with partner George and half-brother David left me bookishly replete - the reading equivalent of a great meal.
My only quibble is with the letters from the woman claiming to be Sam's mother - functionally illiterate and originally from Italy, it's not unremarkable that the grammar and spelling would be flawed. But having almost every single word misspelled ('boxe' for 'box', 'gaw' for 'jaw', 'cees' for 'sees', 'yore' and 'youre' for 'your' but "yo'ur" and "your'" for 'you're', 'remembre' instead of' remember' and 'thingink' for 'thinking') struck me as a little over the top. That is, however, a minor quibble about what was otherwise a great mystery. - Alex
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