The Rule

Maggie Hartley has spent her career defending people the law forgot to protect. She never thought she'd become one of them.She is a criminal defense attorney at the top of her field, a faithful Mormon wife and mother in an affluent Newport Beach ward, a woman who has learned to hold her life together with both hands and call it grace. She follows the rules — all of them — because that is what women like Maggie do.Then comes the biggest case of her career: defending a seventeen-year-old boy charged with murder for a crime he didn't commit. The trial is everywhere. The prosecutor across the aisle is a man she can't stop noticing. And on the Fourth of July, a text she wasn't supposed to see reveals that the two people she trusted most have been lying to her.As the trial unfolds, so does everything Maggie thought she knew — about her church, her marriage, and the rules she has lived by without ever questioning them.The Rule is a novel about faith and betrayal, about the damage done by institutions that ask women to endure and men to be forgiven, and about what remains when everything you built your life on turns out to have been built on someone else's terms.It is also, at its heart, a love story. Just not the one Maggie expected.A note for Mormon and post-Mormon readers:If you have ever watched a man walk out of a bishop's office looking relieved — and understood in that moment exactly what that relief meant, and what it cost someone else — this book was written for you.The Rule renders the textures of Mormon life with an insider's precision: the ward politics, the linger longer, the calling that means everything and the calling that means nothing, the temple recommend as currency, the and the performance of a woman who has learned to be faithfully, exhaustingly fine.For readers who are simply curious about that world from the outside, it is a rare and intimate window into a community that is more complicated, more human, and more quietly painful than headlines ever capture.The Rule is a novel about consequences — who gets to decide them, who escapes them, and what happens to the women who have spent their lives following every rule precisely, only to discover that the rules were never written for them.For readers of Jodi Picoult, Lisa Jewell, and Liane Moriarty. Read more