 First edition cover | |
| Author | "The Secret Barrister", writing as S. J. Fleet |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Legal thriller |
| Publisher | Picador (imprint of Pan Macmillan) [1] |
Publication date | 2025 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 426 [1] |
The Cut Throat Trial is a 2025 legal thriller by the anonymous author "The Secret Barrister", writing as S. J. Fleet. It is the author's first novel.
S. J. FLeet is the pen name of "The Secret Barrister", a junior barrister practising criminal law before the courts of England and Wales. [2] Other books by the same author include The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken , Fake Law, and Nothing But The Truth.
The plot centres on the criminal trial, in the English Crown Court, of three seventeen-year-old boys who are accused of murder. Each of the defendants puts forward a cut-throat defence, namely that the murder was carried out by the other two.
A pre-publication review for the Legal Action Group praised the novel's legal accuracy and authenticity, and considered the finale to be unexpectedly thought-provoking, raising the question of whether the jury's decision reflected the flawed characters or a flawed legal system. [3]
In a review on the online platform Substack, the legal affairs commentator and journalist Joshua Rozenberg said that the novel "exposes some profound and necessary truths about a system that struggles against the odds to deliver the criminal justice on which we all rely." [4]