The Third Verdict

Perthshire. A quarter past five on a January morning.

Joanne Pirnie wakes in the dark in a cottage outside Aberfeldy and goes to the Moses basket at the end of the bed. Her three-month-old daughter is not breathing properly. Her husband is a hundred miles away on a building site in Inverness. Nobody else was in the house.

Two days later Isla dies in intensive care in Dundee, with bleeding inside her head and behind both eyes.

Procurator Fiscal Depute Niamh Tolmie has to decide what that means. Detective Sergeant Ruairidh MacRae interviews the mother three times and hears the same account three times. The doctors who know most about it are worried. The doctors who know most about it disagree.

The morning after the Scottish Parliament votes to abolish not proven, Joanne Pirnie is served with an indictment for the murder of her daughter.

In October, in the High Court in Edinburgh, Advocate Depute Hugh Lamont puts the case to fifteen strangers. Under the old Scottish rules, they still have three verdicts. They are among the last juries that will.

The court will hear their verdict.

You will see their votes.

The Third Verdict is the third novel in The Fifteen, a Scottish courtroom series that follows one prosecution team through eight cases on either side of the reform of the Scottish jury, and shows the reader the one room no real Scot is ever allowed to describe.

Perfect for readers of Scott Turow, John Grisham, Denise Mina and Anatomy of a Scandal.