4 ideas
Julia Larwood, a junior Chancery barrister, joins an 'Art Lovers' tour of Venice partly to escape the Inland Revenue, and sets her sights on Ned, a beautiful young man in the group. Ned is found stabbed in his hotel room, her copy of the Finance Act turns up at the scene, and she is suspected of his murder.
A witness writing for her own reasons (gossip, flirtation, self-justification) writes down details whose significance she doesn't grasp. A distant reader who treats the letter as a historical document, asking why each detail is there and what it implies, can see a pattern the writer, though closer to events, cannot. Being far from the events becomes an advantage because the reader isn't distracted by the witness's own interpretations.
Hilary Tamar solves the case the way a legal historian reads a medieval record: first establish exactly what the source says, then separate what the writer observed from what she assumed, then test each explanation against every recorded fact. Rigorous text-based reasoning of this kind can stand in for physical investigation when the documents are detailed enough.
The narrator Hilary Tamar is never given a gender, and the book gives balanced clues that support either reading. Readers nonetheless tend to settle on one without noticing. The device shows that audiences fill gaps with default assumptions and then treat those assumptions as things the text actually said.