Phineas comes back from Ireland a widower, is drawn into a quarrel over church disestablishment, and stands trial for the murder of a man who had insulted him in the street. Trollope wrote the trial scenes with a barrister's care and made the evidence circumstantial enough to convict an innocent man. The Palliser marriage is in the background, working itself out. Fifty-seven plates by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Edvard Munch, from night bridges to autumn mist, echo the novel's atmosphere of suspicion and uncertain light.
