Before anyone says “Your Honor,” there’s a fact no one in the courtroom can escape: a little girl is dead, and she died afraid.
In Bruce Westrate’s Altar of Ashes, we barely know her, yet she haunts every scene. Adults argue about culture, religion, and rights. She’s the one person with no power and no voice, reduced to a name in an indictment and ashes in an evidence bag.
The novel turns a single rural homicide into a clash between three legal minds: Prosecutor Allen Southworth, defense attorney Madison Fulbright, and legal expert Samantha Desai. Each insists they are fighting for justice. In reality, they are battling over what this child’s death is allowed to mean.
Allen Southworth: The Prosecutor Who Refused to Look Away
Allen Southworth is the one who has to decide whether to put the full weight of the state behind this case. He’s a small-county DA used to drunk driving and family disputes, not ritual killings and national media. From the moment he reads the file, he knows this trial will tear his community open, and that backing away would tear at his own conscience.
Southworth’s strength is a stubborn conviction that some lines cannot be blurred by “tradition.” A child died on American soil; whatever her background, that matters more than how the story will play on talk shows. He knows that pressing the case will invite accusations of bias and cultural arrogance, but he also knows that not pressing it would mean accepting that some victims are too politically complicated to fight for.
Madison Fulbright: The Showman Who Turned Culture into a Shield
Madison Fulbright walks into the same courtroom and sees something else: a chance to turn the case into a referendum on prejudice. Where Southworth is cautious and inward, Fulbright is built for cameras.
His strategy is not to prettify what happened but to surround it with enough history and grievance that jurors doubt their own right to judge it. He talks about Western hypocrisy, colonial arrogance, and the long record of outsiders misreading other peoples’ rituals. Slowly, the focus shifts from “What was done to this girl?” to “What will a guilty verdict say about us?”
Fulbright knows he doesn’t need the jury to love the ritual. He just needs them to be afraid of looking narrow-minded. In that sense, he’s fighting not only for his client, but for a vision of diversity that treats judgment itself as the ultimate sin.
Samantha Desai: The Bridge Between Two Worlds
Then there is Samantha Desai, the expert who refuses to play along with anyone’s script. A seasoned Chicago attorney with Indian roots, she understands why the South Asian community feels targeted and why words like “sati” trigger centuries of painful history. But she also refuses to romanticize any practice that demands the suffering of women and children.
Desai reminds the court that people inside the culture have long fought against such rituals. She can talk about Western abuses and still say, clearly, that some things are simply wrong—whoever does them, for whatever reason. Because she holds both truths at once, Desai ends up in the crossfire.
To Southworth, she is a brake on turning one awful crime into a sweeping judgment on a civilization. To Fulbright, she is a problem: a woman who shares his clients’ background but rejects the idea that culture is a free pass. Her presence forces everyone in the courtroom to face a harder standard: the real test of any tradition is what it does to the weakest person under its power.
Three Warriors, One Question: Who Really Speaks for Her?
What makes this legal showdown gripping is that none of the three is entirely wrong. Southworth is right that law without firm lines can’t protect the vulnerable. Fulbright is right that the majority power can use outrage as a weapon against minorities. Desai is right that dignity has to come before anyone’s pride. Their arguments grind against one another over the same small pile of ashes.
In the end, Altar of Ashes doesn’t ask you to pick a favorite lawyer. It asks you to notice who isn’t speaking—the little girl whose life became the battlefield for other people’s principles. When law, culture, and fear collide in a room like this, the novel quietly asks which warrior you would want speaking for her—and what you’d be willing to risk to stand with them.
Grab your copy of Altar of Ashes today.
