Trial of the Night Court

Detective Alina Moretti thought she knew how power worked.

Three months after exposing a conspiracy that nearly destroyed the Night Court, the hidden supernatural government operating beneath her city’s financial district, Alina has accepted her role as Bridge, the sole neutral authority between mortal law enforcement and arcane governance. The sigil on her wrist marks her as a mediator. Her badge marks her as a detective. Both worlds need her. Neither fully trusts her.

Then the Night Court puts her on trial.

Charged with violating arcane law during her previous investigation, Alina faces a tribunal that could strip her of everything she’s built in the supernatural world. But when a fae envoy is found dead in a magically sealed chamber beneath a financial district skyscraper, the timing is too precise to be coincidence. Someone is using the murder, the trial, and a destabilising magical infrastructure crisis to trigger an ancient governance clause, one that would transfer total authority over the city’s supernatural systems to a single, unaccountable magistrate.

The architect of the conspiracy is sitting on the bench.

With her mortal career under Internal Affairs scrutiny, her supernatural authority eroding by the hour, and the city’s ley-line network hours from catastrophic failure, Alina must assemble an airtight case against an adversary who has never broken a rule, because the adversary wrote the rules. The evidence is technical. The politics are lethal. And the only legal mechanism that can stop the power grab requires Alina to still hold her authority at the moment she invokes it.

Trial of the Night Court is the second book in The Night Court Files, a sharp, politically charged urban fantasy series for readers who like their magic systemic, their heroines competent, and their villains procedurally precise.