On April 12, The Province newspaper in Vancouver ran a story: “Woman assaulted in early-morning attack.” A woman in her 20s was “grabbed from behind by a man and sexually assaulted” in a “quiet Vancouver neighbourhood.”

Bryan D. Palmer is a labour historian — one of Canada’s finest — who teaches at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the department of Canadian studies.

This is 72-year-old William Deverell’s fourth Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp Q.C., Brian Pomeroy legal mystery. Beauchamp, the aged criminal defence war horse of the British Columbia bar and civil libertarian, has gone green and inhabits the Gulf Islands, like the narrator-writer, when he isn’t slouching in Costa Rica.