London, 1761. Sir John Fielding is summoned to St James’s Palace to receive a knighthood at a court newly focused on Queen Charlotte, and John Rawlings accompanies him when Fielding’s wife is unable to attend. The ceremony is disrupted when the nobleman George Goward plunges down the great staircase and dies, apparently in an accident witnessed only by the blind magistrate.
Fielding has heard enough—a breath, a whispered phrase, the movement of someone nearby—to believe Goward was pushed. Rawlings begins questioning a palace circle in which servants, aristocrats and children all possess fragments of the truth. With his own wife expecting their first child, he is drawn into a murder that contrasts the ceremony of the early reign of George III with the intimate dangers concealed inside the royal household.
