With no mobile signal and caring for children for the first time, she becomes disoriented.

When Rose arrives at the huge, gloomy, isolated house on the east coast, she is lost. Nobody knew she was ill and Evan needs Rose to come home and look after his children – Jamie, the toddler son he had with Kate, and Serena, his daughter from a previous marriage. Kate, 41, has died, unexpectedly, of cancer. Rose is living in Italy, teaching English, when she gets a call from her sister Kate’s husband, Evan. While Justice Sleeps is complex and occasionally convoluted, ending in a terrific set-piece legal showdown between Keene and those ranged against her. She digs into why, discovering bodies and clues along the way: “Justice Wynn had typed gibberish on to a piece of paper that he demanded burned upon reading, as though he’d escaped from a John le Carré novel.” As she uncovers a conspiracy reaching the highest levels of government, she makes full use of her photographic memory and tries to stop her drug-addict mother affecting her career as she does so: “Reputation was all you had when you’d been born without the relationships.” Abrams, who started writing novels during her third year at Yale Law School, has previously published romantic thrillers under the pen name Selena Montgomery.

When Wynn falls into a coma, Keene is stunned to discover that she, rather than his wife or son, has been given power of attorney over his life. Set in a US ruled by a “shrill xenophobe of a president”, it follows Avery Keene, a young and brilliant law clerk for the Washington judge Justice Wynn, who has been looking into a controversial biotech merger. Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia and architect of the Democratic victories in Georgia’s US Senate runoff elections in 2020, has found time in her busy political career to write legal thriller While Justice Sleeps.

Stacey abrams thriller