The Trinity

The Trinity is a small rowhouse on a narrow Philadelphia street. It has been Harry Whitman's home for his whole life, and he lives in it alone. He is forty-six, a public defender in the criminal courts of the First Judicial District, and he takes the cases no one else will take.

Six of them run through this novel: a young man at a birthday party in the Bellevue, a boy certified to adult court trying to get back to juvenile court, a Russian chiropractor charged with federal fraud, a longtime client back on a plea, a stationary engineer accused of an assault that may have been self-defense, and a man on trial for the murder of his oldest friend. Each case asks for a different kind of lawyer, and Harry, an exceptional cross-examiner who has never learned to negotiate, has to become each one in turn.

And there is Miranda, the social worker 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.

Set entirely in Philadelphia, from the Criminal Justice Center and the holding cells on State Road to South Street and Society Hill, The Trinity is literary fiction rather than a thriller: a portrait of a city's courts from the defense table, and of what a year of that work costs the person doing it. The prose is spare and unsentimental, and the book carries a plain reverence for the public defenders who stand beside the accused without being asked, without being chosen, and without being paid by the client. Its epigraph comes from Deuteronomy. Justice, justice shall you pursue.

Praise for The Trinity

"A thoughtful, humane, and detail-oriented legal procedural set in Philadelphia. Court scenes, client meetings, and grousing sessions at bars all compel and boast an air of reportage, and the storytelling blends a savvy understanding of how systems actually work with the relatable weariness of working within them. The plotting avoids cheap twists or legal thriller theatrics, but Salvati demonstrates that, even in a system that ensures burnout, each case matters." BookLife Reviews

For readers of Sergio de la Pava's A Naked Singularity, Kevin Davis's Defending the Damned, Scott Turow, Richard Price, and William Lashner.

Daniel Salvati was born in Philadelphia and has lived there all his life. His time in the world of public defense runs quietly through his fiction. The Trinity is his first novel.