Deed presides over the murder trial of Maurice Hart, a black defendant who shot and killed the driver of a van which ran over and killed Hart's daughter in a hit and run accident.

At the same time, the judge is keen to investigate Hart's attractive defence counsel more closely, and he also jousts over the case with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at a London fencing club. Of course, Deed undertakes these misdemeanours against his professional code in supposedly good causes. These include helping his student daughter Charlie to protest against genetically modified crops (and springing her from the cells when she is arrested) and working out how to free his vigilante defendant.

Deed presides over the case of a young man's death on a building site, in which the well-connected construction company boss is trying to lay the blame on his employees. Deed's determination to get at the truth is strangely unwelcome to the Lord Chancellor's department. At the same time, Charlie Deed is getting herself into hot water by 'liberating' a dog from a laboratory in the name of animal rights. With the police hot on her trail, Charlie adroitly dumps the dog on Deed and a blackmailer gets to work.

After a call girl is found dead in a skip, an Arab sheikh's chauffeur is charged with killing her, but the evidence points to the sheikh himself being involved in the murder. Unfortunately for Deed, the Arab ruler was in London to place a huge order with a British aircraft manufacturer, and pressure is piled on Deed by the British government, as well as by the sheikh's own. The plot thickens when counsel for the prosecution is also killed and Deed's lover, Jo Mills, takes over the case, and when he hears that Georgina Channing, his former wife, is engaged to marry Neil Haughton, the government minister fighting for the aeroplane order. Before long, witnesses disappear and the jury is being interfered with - by the British Government, no less. And then Deed gets an offer they think he can't refuse, when appointment as an Appeal Court judge is dangled before him.

Deed rekindles his old love affair with Francesca Rochester, and at first he fails to notice that she is making use of him in a struggle with her dotty aunt for power over a property and publishing empire. Francesca's husband Ian and another enemy set out to undermine the Judge's credibility, aiming to have him removed from office.In court, Deed is busy presiding over a murder trial in which a young lawyer and his brother and sister are charged with conspiring with a burglar to kill their parents. Meanwhile, the judge's student daughter Charlie has got herself pregnant by a married lecturer at her college. Charlie's mother persuades her to have an abortion, which Deed is against, but he finds out about it too late. We discover that Deed bitterly regrets Jo's decision years before to abort his own child.