MW suspense

Her name was Stella. She was a widow, still young, still lovely, but with her memory clouded by grief. She did not know that a dark conspiracy was stripping her of friends, relatives, protectors. She did not know the stranger who appeared at her door, claiming to be her lost husband. She only knew she did not believe this man yet she could not resist him.

Antony Maitland #23 Antony Maitland, barrister and very confidential detective, reluctantly journeys to a grey town in the English midlands to defend a young boy who is, on the face of it, guilty of murder and art theft. The boy is mysteriously unwilling to say anything on his own behalf. As long as the boy refused to speak there was no possible line of defense. In order to save his client from what, Maitland finally realizes, will be a gross miscarriage of justice, he has to piece together the boy's troubled past and in the process, stumbles across a web of criminal intent in which the boy is just one victim -- and Maitland is the other.