They have sex on her desk, after which he leaves and she is found the following morning by her husband Carl (a psychotherapist), and six-year-old daughter Matilda, who come seeking for her when she did not return home the previous evening.

When Carl and Matilda return home, he turns his head to Alison's stew, a dish she spent the afternoon cooking.

The following day, Alison discovers that Patrick will be instructing her in her first murder case; Madeline, a 44 year old wealthy woman who has been found by the cleaner one morning sitting next to her stabbed husband, Edwin, in the bedroom of their multi-million pound townhouse in Clapham, London.

Madeline insists on pleading guilty, explaining that she had drunk around half a bottle of gin that night, and cannot recall what happened afterwards.

Madeline's son James had visited his parents that weekend, but returned to boarding school the night before Edwin was found dead.

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, while Carl is a "sententious fussbudget of a husband", "Alison Bailey, is a workaholic, briskly competent criminal barrister in the English court system.

After hours, she’s a fall-down drunk entangled in an adulterous and abusive affair with the senior solicitor"[6] It describes both Carl and Patrick as "deplorable".

[7] Quibi and World Productions, the producers of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, chose Blood Orange for development into a TV series.