📖 Book of my Month ~ The Cut Throat Trial by S J Fleet ; The Secret Barrister

Pan MacMillan
Picador
28 August 2025

Thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book to review

 

It is one of the biggest trials of the year. Three seventeen-year-old boys are accused of the brutal murder of an elderly teacher on New Year's Eve.

Each boy denies it.

Each points the finger at the other two.

But they can’t all be innocent.

The three defence barristers have only one job: to persuade the jury that their client is not guilty. But they’re up against a prosecutor who needs to win the case, no matter the cost.

Because when the game is murder, the competition is deadly.

📖 My Review

I enjoy a good courtroom drama and this book really gives a sense of watching a complicated trial evolving in real time especially as we get to have a fly in the wall view of what’s happening to all of those who are involved in trying to prove either the guilt, or innocence, of three seventeen year old boys who are charged with the murder of an elderly man on New Year’s Eve. We get the prospective from each of the defence barristers along with that of the prosecutor and also a few sections in which the judge shares his experience in steering court procedures and keeping control of everything.

It’s a tense and fascinating crime drama and one that I could easily see transferred to a TV series as it explores the minutiae of the case, painting a picture of the accused and the way in which each boy, all unstable narrators, offer their version of events. I don’t want to say too much as that would be to do the story a disservice and this deserves to be read without any spoilers. There were some clever twists I didn’t see coming and whilst I thought I had the outcome of the trial pretty much sussed  out, I really hadn’t, and that is what made this such a clever story. I also realised just what a difficult job the jury had in making sense of everything and coming up with their decisions.

Cleverly done, with precise amounts of intricate detail, written by someone who understands the justice system really well and who puts a good case forward highlighting the drama, pathos and the unpredictability of reaching an appropriate verdict. 

I enjoyed reading this courtroom drama, which was just a little bit different, and so for that reason I am making The Cut Throat Trial the Book of My Month for September.

About the Author

The bestselling author, The Secret Barrister, writes fiction as S. J. Fleet. A junior barrister specializing in criminal law, they write for many publications and are the author of the award-winning The Secret Barrister blog. Their first book, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, was a Sunday Times number-one bestseller and spent more than a year in the top-ten bestseller list; it won the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction Award and was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and the Specsavers Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies and Nothing But the Truth: The Memoir of an Unlikely Lawyer were instant Sunday Times top-ten bestsellers on publication. The Cut Throat Trial is their first novel.

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