As he is about to leave town to meet his fiancée in the mountain resort of Chamonix, Nicolas Kléber is suddenly called to Fleury-Mérogis, the women's prison in the outskirts of Paris. An inmate he defended in criminal court three years ago has been accused of insubordination, and she must appear before the board of discipline.

Kléber has some pretty bad memories of her trial. He lost the case in a crushing defeat, and his client was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment for the murder of her boss, who was also her lover. Although she never stopped clamouring her innocence, the jury had not been swayed. Even Kléber had not really believed her story.

Yet he must counsel her now, so he rushes off to Fleury-Mérogis. The sooner the situation is resolved, he thinks, the sooner he'll get to the snow-covered peaks of the Alps.

But he has not counted on the hunger for revenge that has filled Clémence Lange's days and nights in prison for the past three years. She has had plenty of time to come up with a Machiavellian plot to make Kléber pay for his incompetence and negligence.

Sequestered in a prototype cell in an empty wing of the prison, our dashing lawyer has landed himself in a tight spot…

A terrifying drama, with no exit in sight.

Could Laura Sadowski have invented the French legal thriller?

Laura Sadowski is a lawyer specialising in copyright law. L'Affaire Clémence Lange is her first novel.