The Frame - A Manchester Crime Thriller

Manchester. Spinningfields. The top floor of a glass building. An architect lies dead in his private drafting room, stabbed once, surrounded by his own blueprints.

The door was locked. The CCTV shows no one came in.

DCI Tom Harding has five suspects.

Marcus Thorne, the business partner who stood to gain eight million from the death.

Evelyn Reed, the junior architect blocked from partnership in March.

Julian Croft, the disgruntled client whose project was walked away from.

Isabelle Moreau, the rival who had been circling the same commission for a decade.

Clara Reeves, the estranged sister with twelve years of grievance.

Five suspects. Five alibis. Four of them airtight. The case looks impossible until Harding starts pulling at threads, and one by one the alibis begin to come apart.

Then it goes to trial.

Eleanor Pendle KC is not the barrister anyone expects to find defending a man charged with murder. She has built her career in regulatory law, taking cases the regulator did not believe could be lost. The instruction lands on her desk at six on the evening of the arrest. By the time the trial opens she has read the file twice and noticed something the prosecution have not.

The shape of the case is wrong.

The Frame is a tight courtroom thriller about a murder that was solved before it was committed, a detective who has been planning for five years, and a defence barrister who can read the architecture of a lie. It moves from a glass building in Spinningfields to a holding cell at Strangeways, from a poker game in Hale to a walkway over Piccadilly bus station that gave way one Saturday morning in March and killed eight people.

One of them was Emma Harding.

She was thirty four.

For readers who enjoy Mick Herron, Steve Cavanagh, Jane Casey, and Robert Galbraith. The first novel in a new Manchester-set series featuring Eleanor Pendle KC.