Kill All the Judges.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When last we saw Arthur Beauchamp in the award-winning novel April Fool, the celebrated “dean of West Coast criminal lawyers” had retired to an idyllic Gulf island to raise goats and enjoy life among a rogues’ gallery of amiable eccentrics and with an environmental-activist wife. In the midst of this, Beauchamp reluctantly left his retirement to defend one Nick the Owl, who took pride in his skill as a jewel thief but denied being a murderer.

It is a delight to welcome the islanders back in Kill All the Judges. Beauchamp initially resists when a fellow islander attempts to persuade the lawyer to defend him on a murder charge. He relents, however, when the defendant’s attorney becomes quite unmoored and runs wildly from the courtroom.

The second half of the story deals in large part with the trial, and a highly entertaining affair it is. Beauchamp’s verbal jousts with a pompous judge would do Horace Rumpole proud. Meanwhile, on the island, Beauchamp’s wife complicates his life by running as a Green Party candidate in a federal by-election.

This is a delightful read, wickedly funny at times but blending its comedy with suspense as the murder trial progresses. Deverrell has given us characters we can enjoy spending time with; even Nick the Owl has a cameo, this time practising his nefarious talents for Beauchamp, who saved him from prison in April Fool.

A word of advice: excerpts from Kill All the Judges, the novel within the novel, appear in Part 1, and are so dreadfully trite that one might be tempted at times just to skim them and return to the “real” story. Do not do this. The fiction being written by the hapless, drug-addled lawyer who first took the case is much more important than it might seem.