Patchwork People is the second in the Patchwork trilogy – Patchwork Man being the first. 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.