After more than two years, criminal lawyer Robert Rotenberg returns to the fictional courthouses, chambers, back rooms, and dark halls of Toronto’s legal demimonde, and to the methodical and unassuming investigative habits of detective Ari Greene, first introduced in Rotenberg’s critically acclaimed first novel, Old City Hall.

This time around, Greene is on hand for what appears to be a slam-dunk case: the stabbing murder of supermarket heir Terrance Wyler at the hands of his estranged wife Samantha, who shows up at her lawyer’s office clutching a bloody knife. Vituperative e-mails, Terrance’s new movie-star girlfriend, and longstanding disapproval from her husband’s close-knit family give Samantha plenty of motives – and provide quite the challenge for her defence.

But, this being a crime novel, secrets are plentiful, conflicts of interest abound (one of the book’s running jokes involves female Crown attorneys hooking up with cops), and surprises emerge at the most dramatic moments. Rotenberg juggles the many plot elements with aplomb, unveiling each new surprise with care and patience.

Rotenberg could stand to improve his flat prose style, in which one character is described as “a tall, high-cheekboned woman” and others spell out their intentions – legal or romantic – in an obvious, somewhat stilted fashion. Regardless, the author’s knowledgeable portrait of the Canadian legal system’s machinations – unfamiliar to many in the country and utterly foreign to Rotenberg’s growing international audience – are more than sufficient to overcome the book’s literary flaws.