Parisian lawyer Dubon is a man of routine. He spends his days drafting wills, early evening is devoted to his mistress, and he’s home by 7:30 for dinner with his wife. This careful structure begins to fall apart, however, when his clerk’s mother trips over her cat and injures herself, forcing the clerk to take time off to care for her. Unaware that Dubon doesn’t see clients in the late afternoon, the clerk’s substitute ushers in a mysterious young widow with an extraordinary request.

The widow wants Dubon to prove the innocence of her friend, an army captain named Dreyfus who has been exiled for selling secrets to the Germans. Though such a case is outside of Dubon’s expertise, he’s attracted to the widow and agrees to take it on. He finds himself working undercover in the French government’s department of counter-espionage, and must risk his reputation to prove that Dreyfus was framed.

A Man in Uniform is the second novel by Kate Taylor, whose debut, Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region). Once again, Taylor sets her story against the backdrop of Paris at the end of the 19th century, and her effective use of historical detail ensures that the novel is not overburdened by it.

Though the Dreyfus affair is a well-known historical event, Dubon’s involvement is pure fiction. The fiction is not as compelling as the fact, however. Some of the coincidences driving the plot seem unlikely, particularly the idea that Dubon could walk into a job in the French counter-espionage department and find himself assigned to the one file he’d gone there to investigate. Though chance can be an effective plot device (the accident with the cat, for example), too much of it can negatively affect a mystery’s plot.

However, A Man in Uniform has moments of suspense and some good plot twists, and Taylor’s fine prose and intriguing depiction of historical Paris make for a pleasant enough read, despite the novel’s flaws.