At a wedding party in Cornwall in the summer of 1981, Chris Napier is shocked to recognise a dishevelled intruder as his childhood friend Nicky Lanyon, whom he has not seen since his father, Michael Lanyon, was hanged for the murder of Chris's great-uncle, Joshua Carnoweth, in 1947.

It was the inheritance of old Joshua's fortune that led the then humble Napier family to their present state of affluence. When Nicky subsequently hangs himself, Chris sets out on a journey into his own and others' memories of the tragic events of 34 years before. Driven on by Nicky's firm belief in his father's innocence, he begins to doubt the offical version of those events and to question the conduct of several members of his own family.

The convolutions and dramatic possibilities of the law are prime material for novelists.

Some of those possibilities are no longer available to us thanks to the onward march of reform. Laudable as those reforms are, it does mean we can’t have contemporary plots turning on simple issues of disinheritance the way our Victorian forebears did and the abolition of capital punishment has taken some of the sting out of fictional murder. (US authors have a big advantage over us there, of course, much to our chagrin.)

But the law is a dense forest, with many trees still standing. The plot for Beyond Recall originated in what suddenly struck me one day as an obvious question. It’s a well known legal principle that you can’t benefit from the proceeds of a crime of which you’ve been convicted. So, someone convicted of murder can’t inherit the estate of their murder victim. A will to that effect would be set aside and the rules of intestacy applied to find an alternative heir. But what happens if, years after such an event, the murderer is found to have been wrongfully convicted? Is the old will reinstated? Does the alternative heir have to return or repay what they inherited?

The answer, I discovered, is YES. And in that yes a story stretching over many years and several generations was born. Nobody wants to have to give up a fine house they’ve lived in or – worse – repay money they’ve already spent, effectively swapping places with hard up, disgruntled relatives they’ve got used to ignoring. Some people would go to great lengths to avoid such a nightmarish outcome. Just how far they might go is the story told in Beyond Recall.