Harry Whitman is forty-six years old. He has been a Philadelphia public defender for nineteen years. He lives alone in the Trinity, a three stories of brick, one room to a floor, that his parents left him, with his father’s wine in the cellar and his father’s books on the shelves.

Then, in the space of a year and a half: six clients. A gentle career thief whose mother sends the lawyer home with biscotti. A brilliant fifteen-year-old the Commonwealth wants to try as an adult. A stationary engineer who says the stabbing was self-defense. A young man whose accuser’s story does not survive its own timeline. A doctor carried into a federal fraud built by other people. And a churchgoing man charged with killing an old friend over money nobody ever saw, a case with something wrong at its center that Harry spends more than a year taking apart, one document at a time.

And Miranda, the colleague who rides with him to the juvenile jail, reads his briefs on the train, and moves her life into the narrow house one floor at a time.

The Trinity is a novel about the work, what defending people costs, what it gives back, and what a man built for other people’s worst days does when his own arrives.

Thank you. 

Daniel J. Salvati