A transgender detective reopens the investigation into the murder of her former high school classmate. Her captain has one request: don’t.
All We Hide | Robyn Gigl | Soho Crime (456 pages)
Everyone in this novel is hiding something. Some people are simply better at it than others.
Before the action begins in Robyn Gigl’s All We Hide a murder conviction has already been overturned because prosecutors buried exculpatory evidence. The detective who worked the original case may have hidden that evidence, or he may simply be losing his memories to Alzheimer’s. A celebrated criminal defense lawyer refuses to reveal who paid the enormous legal fees that won his client a second chance. A woman disappeared decades earlier, leaving behind a family built on unanswered questions.
When Detective Lauren Kelly decides to investigate that cold case, she quickly realizes the department has a vested interest in moving on. Her captain has only one instruction.
“I told you that wasn’t an unsolved case. Riccoli was guilty. Find another fucking case.”
Faster than you can say cover-up, Lauren does exactly the opposite.
What All We Hide Chooses to Reveal
In All We Hide, Robyn Gigl’s smart, satisfying legal procedural, the title reaches further than the crime itself. Every major character is calculating what to reveal, what to conceal, or how to keep concealing it. Sometimes it’s burying the evidence of a crime. Sometimes it’s the personal cost of telling the truth about yourself.
While I was reading, Justice Brandeis’s famous observation (“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”) came to mind. He may have been on to something. This novel is a persuasive argument to open the blinds.
Gigl brings genuine courtroom authority and established literary chops to the page. The author of the award-winning Erin McCabe series, she is also a New Jersey trial attorney.
This caught my eye in her bio: She served on the defense team in one of the longest criminal trials in state history. The lawyer-author combo can yield varried results. In All We Hide, the legal issues are embedded, granular, but easily digestible.
There is even an action-packed yet believable chain of custody scene.
The Cold Case Nobody Wants Solved
Suffice it to say, Detective Kelly hardly receives a hero’s welcome when she decides to open a cold case looking into the murder of Sherry Darling (homage to Candy Darling) a trans sex worker and Lauren’s former high school classmate. It happened 20 years ago.
She’s been exiled to the county’s Cold Case Unit (FYI, she is the entire unit). Officially it’s an assignment. Unofficially it feels like a convenient place to park the county’s only openly trans detective while avoiding accusations of discrimination. Lauren chooses to reopen the Riccoli investigation despite repeated warnings that the case should stay closed.
What follows is less a traditional whodunit than an investigation into how institutions protect themselves.
Lauren isn’t a rogue detective charging off. She is mindful of probable cause, jurisdictional tripwires, and gathering evidence that will stand up in what is, at this point, a very theoretical future trial. She has to navigate office politics, a shared computer system, skeptical supervisors, competing agencies, reluctant witnesses, and the uncomfortable possibility that corruption extends farther than anyone wants to admit.
Gigl knows that cover-ups rarely depend on a single villain. They survive because enough people decide that asking difficult questions is more dangerous than accepting comfortable answers.
Brady Isn’t Just a Plot Device
The Brady violation sits at the center of that system. Gigl doesn’t treat suppressed evidence as a convenient plot twist dropped into the third act. Instead, she shows what a Brady failure really represents: not simply hidden evidence, but a chain of decisions stretching across investigators and prosecutors, each person choosing to look the other way.
Not surprisingly, Gigl gets the doctrine right. The suppressed evidence checks every Brady box: it favored the defense, prosecutors intentionally buried it, and it went directly to guilt rather than some collateral issue. That’s Brady material, not merely evidence the state wishes had disappeared.
Who Paid the Lawyer?
The novel’s most enjoyable legal surprise, however, involves attorney-client privilege.
Ray Ashley, the celebrated defense attorney who replaced Riccoli’s public defender, spends much of the novel refusing to disclose who paid his legal fees, insisting the information is privileged. Then, in one of my favorite scenes, he reconsiders.
Not to get too into the legal weeds, but under the general rule followed in most jurisdictions, the identity of the person paying an attorney’s fee usually isn’t protected by attorney-client privilege because it isn’t itself a confidential legal communication.
There are narrow exceptions when revealing the payer would effectively disclose privileged advice, but those exceptions are exactly that: narrow. Gigl never turns this into a lecture. She simply lets a practicing lawyer think through a genuine legal question.
And here’s the funny thing: It’s a cliffhanger. I really wanted to know who fronted the money.
The Things That Can’t Stay Hidden
For all its legal craftsmanship, though, the investigation isn’t what stayed with me most.
Lauren’s personal life carries as much emotional weight as the murder investigation. Her relationship with an ex-wife she still loves, a teenage daughter trying to navigate her father’s transition, a father disappearing into Alzheimer’s, and a tentative new romance all unfold alongside the criminal case without ever feeling like obligatory side stories. More than once I found myself just as eager to learn what would happen to Lauren’s family as I was to discover who committed the murder.
That balance is where the novel really works. Lauren being a transgender woman factors in to how she navigates her department and her family, but she is never reduced to a symbol. She is a detective, a parent, a daughter, and a complicated human being trying to solve a cold case while figuring out her own work-in-progress life.
The book’s dedication quietly underscores that larger theme:
“This book is dedicated with love to all the members of the transgender and gender diverse communities. Stay brave, stay strong, do not despair. We will not be erased.”
The acknowledgments close the same way, more intimately. Gigl speaks directly to her trans and nonbinary “siblings,” urging them not to give up hope, and telling them, plainly, that she’s proud to stand with them.
It reminds readers that deciding what to reveal about yourself is never an abstract question for many trans people. That idea echoes throughout the novel without ever overwhelming it. The mystery remains a mystery. The legal issues remain genuinely interesting. The personal story gives both their emotional stakes.
A good legal procedural asks who committed the crime. A better one asks who benefited from hiding the truth. All We Hide asks both questions, and delivers satisfying answers.
Well, maybe not every question. What’s going to. happen in Lieutenant Kelly’s personal life? There are some intriguing possibilities.
The Fine Print: Many thanks to Soho Crime for the advanced galley.
Related Reviews on Judicial Junkie:
- Institutions on Trial: Crime Fictions by Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve — Explores how legal systems protect themselves, even when justice suffers.
- Wrongful Convictions: Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff — Examines how unreliable informants and institutional failures send innocent people to prison.
- Police Procedure: Ironwood by Michael Connelly — Harry Bosch shows why probable cause and chain of custody matter as much as instinct.
““Thank you so much for this amazing review of All We Hide. I truly appreciate the way you analyzed the book without giving anything away. I loved it.”
— Robyn Gigl, Author