I should have known better. Never judge a book by its cover. Or, more appropriate in this case: never approach a book on the strength of a review.

The review in this case linked the book’s story to the story of its author, who, just to remind people, had to resign and leave politics because of allegations involving his son.

Let me make it amply clear at the outset: there is nothing in the story that resembles the past history of Mr Gatt. To approach the book with Mr Gatt’s history in mind, as I did, risks going for something and then not finding it.

The book is about a magistrate, not a politician, to begin with. A serious, high-minded, lawyer who gets appointed to be a magistrate because he is so serious and upright.

But even such a pillar of society has his own murky past and the past surfaces after all these years and confronts him. It’s sweet justice come for the magistrate just to show that there’s justice of sorts in this life.

But this is not the only problem to come his way: his dearly loved daughter’s fiancée is (unjustly) accused of a drug charge and, unbeknown to him, he has to sit in judgement in this case.

This is where, in my opinion, the story takes off into cloud-cuckoo land, for in normal circumstances, a magistrate in those circumstances would have recused himself and saved his honour.

But in refusing to do so, and in judging the case the way he did, the magistrate-father alienates his own daughter who goes off to live abroad. This is perhaps the only slim resemblance in the book to the author’s real life.

For a long time, the novel is balmy and saccharine. It describes the everyday events in the magistrate’s family in the same humdrum way they take place. But art, and literature, cannot stay for long at this level of the obvious.

Then again, the upshot is that the magistrate does not get a taste of his own justice, at the end. He and his family are those who always fall on their feet. The threatened catastrophe does not happen and all, presumably, live happy ever after.