Amazon.com (ISBN 0312261861, Hardcover)

A rumor campaign threatens to thwart London barrister Leo Davies's hope of election to that rarefied strata of the British legal hierarchy, the Queen's Counsel. The rumors are based on truth, for Leo's sex life is hardly conventional. In a typical mystery novel, such a scenario would lead to blackmail or murder--or both. But Caro Fraser's new novel is neither typical nor a mystery. All of the drama in this character study of a fascinating protagonist comes from Leo's interior struggle with issues of sex, love, class, and ambition. The real mystery is how erroneously this book has been cast as a legal thriller.

Advised that the best way to scotch the rumors is to take a wife, Leo becomes involved with Rachel Dean, a beautiful and emotionally rigid solicitor who has good reason to be so guarded. That Leo's close friend Anthony also covets Rachel might initially strike readers as an unnecessary diversion, but Fraser brilliantly uses the men's relationship to illuminate Leo's complicated sexual nature, which is enacted in his courtship of Rachel and his almost inadvertent wakening of her sexual passion. "There's too much fear in you," Leo says when Anthony charges him with using Rachel to further his own ambitions. "Don't you remember? Or don't you want to remember? There are things you don't want to confront--things about Rachel that you'll never understand. You're empty. You're devoid of anything that could help her, because you've never been to that part of yourself where you find out things, the best and the worst. But you're young. You'll learn." Leo's journey through the tortuous landscape of his own mental inferno makes for compelling reading in a sophisticated and engrossing novel. --Jane Adams