Story Behind The Book
In the first of the trilogy, Patchwork Man, Lawrence Juste QC is faced with not only misdeeds from his past, but also an enigma – his recently deceased – wife, who now seems to have been far removed from what he thought her to be. He also, and worryingly, may have committed incest with the sister he never knew, having been separated from the family the day she was born. The product of that union might be Danny, the boy he defended from a charge of manslaughter, and who brings him back into contact with his birth family, including the brother he betrayed whilst in the children’s home, the abusive bully he’s been avoiding ever since and Kat – Danny’s social worker. Kat awakens his frozen emotions, the bully threatens to ruin him and the question of Danny’s parentage hangs over Juste like a guillotine waiting to fall. Patchwork People is the second in the Patchwork trilogy. It opens in the aftermath of Lawrence Juste QC winning his young client’s manslaughter case and temporarily gagging the bully who’s threatened Juste since childhood. There’s an uneasy truce in place between Juste and his recently re-discovered family as his wife’s funeral approaches. It’s a period of calm before the storm – which arrives on the eve of the funeral with a package of ‘evidence’, apparently from a dead women, together with an ominous black edged blackmail card. A slow drip feed of similar items of evidence and clues eventually lead Juste to wonder whether his wife is really dead: ‘I think I cremated someone who wasn’t my wife.’ Juste has to piece together the clues, dodge a potential charge of murder himself after his troublesome sister is found dead in his kitchen and navigate the dangerous waters of determining whether his young client, Danny, is, or isn’t his son. The resolution involves an explosion, a revelation and a resurrection, leaving Juste with a new way forward, but still dodging the misdeeds of the past in order to tread it, but to tell any more would be a spoiler...