We were delighted to welcome back the Crown Court judge, barrister and crime novelist Nicola Williams to our first Authors’ Club lunch of 2026. She last addressed us in August 2023, so we know what a wealth of experience, insight and forensic precision she brings to her legal thrillers, of which her latest, Killer Instinct (Penguin Books), is the third to feature the young, working-class Black barrister Lee Mitchell.
An erudite and entertaining speaker, Nicola explained that this latest novel was intended to examine the way barristers’ chambers work, and the interplay of class, sex and money in this fiercely competitive environment, which she compared to Game of Thrones or Succession.
Alongside the dynamic between solicitor and barrister and the friction between the City of London Police and the Met, the novel explores the role of the Senior Clerk. While the Head of Chambers is a senior barrister who nominally runs the show, real power resides with the Senior Clerk. Though he may earn more than many barristers and frequent the same Mayfair clubs, he has no legal training and is not regarded as their social equal – but he assigns the briefs, and any barrister who wants to move up the career ladder must keep in his good books.
In the case of her fictional Senior Clerk Tom Mannion, this is literally true, as the secret diary in which he keeps a record of his colleagues’ secrets is a key element in the plot. Nicola read a short extract that revealed Mannion’s arrogant and abrasive character as he insults a beggar on the steps of his club and shoves a woman out of the way at a Tube station. Needless to say, Mannion is soon found dead in one of the City of London’s sinister alleyways.
Having grown up ‘somewhere like Peckham or Camberwell’, Lee Mitchell now lives in Dulwich Village (I’ll watch out for her next time I’m in the Crown and Greyhound); her friend Simone ribs her for having sold out and lost touch with her roots. But she knows how easily prejudice can influence judgments, and when the crime is pinned on Dean, a working-class junior clerk who ‘seems like the type’, she agrees to defend him. As the trial progresses, it becomes apparent that he was not the only person in chambers with a motive to kill Mannion.
In response to a question from an audience member as to how she managed to combine writing with a demanding legal career, Nicola explained that she took a long break from writing after her first book, Without Prejudice, was published in 1998. She had written it from midnight to four in the morning between days in court, and as she grew older felt that she could no longer keep up that pace. Years later, just before the Covid-19 lockdown, she was invited to a book group at the law firm Slaughter and May, where she met Bernardine Evaristo, who praised the book and regretted that Nicola appeared to have given up writing for the law. That motivated her to reduce her legal workload so she could write at a more sensible hour, and embarked on a second Lee Mitchell thriller, Until Proven Innocent, although writing after such a long break was like ‘starting an old car on a cold day’. Evaristo, meanwhile, selected Without Prejudice for Penguin’s Black Britain: Writing Back series.
Nicola Williams told us that she plans to write two more Lee Mitchell books, of which the next will be about AI and the law.