James Meredith faces the gallows for a murder he didn't commit, convicted on circumstantial evidence and jealousy. But his cousin Jack Glover knows the truth , and he knows the clock is ticking. Meredith turns thirty on Monday, and according to their father's eccentric will, if he's unmarried by then, the entire family fortune passes to his sister, who's already in the ground. The solution: a bride, quick and willing, with nothing to lose. Enter Lydia Beale, an artist burdened by her dead father's debts, offered an impossible sum to marry a stranger before the hanging. What follows is classic Wallace , inheritance conspiracies, last-minute reversals, and a heroine who must decide whether she's saving an innocent man or cementing her own doom. The courtroom sets the stage, but the real trial happens in the shadows.
