The Trinity

One public defender. Six cases. One year in the Philadelphia criminal courts.

Harry Whitman has spent nineteen years standing beside the people no one chose to stand beside. He is better at trying a case than at pleading one out, and this year six clients cross his desk, each one a life pressed down into a docket number, each one asking him what the law is actually for.

Then, in the narrow Philadelphia rowhouse he calls the Trinity, a life he had stopped expecting begins to take shape.

Written with an unsentimental attention to the daily texture of the criminal courts and a plain reverence for the people who labor inside them, The Trinity is a novel about justice and mercy, about the cost of doing difficult work well for a long time, and about what it means to keep standing between another person and the full weight of the State. Its epigraph comes from Deuteronomy. Justice, justice shall you pursue.

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