Book
The Case of the Brass Verdict
Series: Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket
Published August 23, 2026
For twenty-one years the gavel sat locked in the judge's chambers. It came out for one afternoon of his memorial — and three weeks later it was on the floor of his own courtroom, beside his first wife.
Kensington, Ohio, October 1978. Judge Edmund Harcourt dies thirty-nine days before the election, and on the Sunday the county opens the courthouse and the town comes through the rotunda for two hours. His daughter Joanna is given the table to arrange: the portrait, the robe, and the ceremonial gavel that has stood behind glass in his chambers since the year he took the bench. Standing at the back with her gloves still on is a woman nobody introduces — the first wife, gone from the county since 1957.
Lenora Harcourt does not leave. She has twenty-one years of letters and something she means to have said out loud in the town that agreed not to say it. Three weeks later, while the lodge on the square is holding its dinner four hundred yards away, she is killed inside the rail of her husband's courtroom, at the foot of his witness stand, with his own gavel.
The investigation closes on Joanna in a day, and every brick in it is true. Her fingerprints are on the brass. She threatened the dead woman in front of witnesses. A journal is gone from the motel room, and she lied about what time she reached the square. She is twenty-four and teaches third grade, and on Monday the sheriff arrests her.
Vance Sterling comes ninety miles on the widow's telephone call — into a courthouse where every judge has stepped aside, a special prosecutor has been sent from two counties over, and nobody will discuss a verdict from the spring of 1955, when a service-station attendant was killed on the highway and a man went to the chair for it.
Every fact in the State's file is true. Its one defect is a question nobody in Winslow County ever thought to ask.
The Case of the Brass Verdict is the fourth case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Ohio of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along. It is the longest case on the docket, and the first that takes Sterling out of Cleveland.
Kensington, Ohio, October 1978. Judge Edmund Harcourt dies thirty-nine days before the election, and on the Sunday the county opens the courthouse and the town comes through the rotunda for two hours. His daughter Joanna is given the table to arrange: the portrait, the robe, and the ceremonial gavel that has stood behind glass in his chambers since the year he took the bench. Standing at the back with her gloves still on is a woman nobody introduces — the first wife, gone from the county since 1957.
Lenora Harcourt does not leave. She has twenty-one years of letters and something she means to have said out loud in the town that agreed not to say it. Three weeks later, while the lodge on the square is holding its dinner four hundred yards away, she is killed inside the rail of her husband's courtroom, at the foot of his witness stand, with his own gavel.
The investigation closes on Joanna in a day, and every brick in it is true. Her fingerprints are on the brass. She threatened the dead woman in front of witnesses. A journal is gone from the motel room, and she lied about what time she reached the square. She is twenty-four and teaches third grade, and on Monday the sheriff arrests her.
Vance Sterling comes ninety miles on the widow's telephone call — into a courthouse where every judge has stepped aside, a special prosecutor has been sent from two counties over, and nobody will discuss a verdict from the spring of 1955, when a service-station attendant was killed on the highway and a man went to the chair for it.
Every fact in the State's file is true. Its one defect is a question nobody in Winslow County ever thought to ask.
The Case of the Brass Verdict is the fourth case on Vance Sterling: The Cuyahoga Docket — courtroom mysteries in the classic style, set in the analog Ohio of the late 1970s: fair-play puzzles, shoe-leather investigation, and verdicts turned on evidence the reader has seen all along. It is the longest case on the docket, and the first that takes Sterling out of Cleveland.