A Novel of Philadelphia
THE TRINITY
a novel
The Trinity is a small rowhouse on a narrow Philadelphia street.
It has been Harry Whitman’s home for his life. He lives in it alone. He is forty-six, a public defender in the criminal courts of the First Judicial District. He takes the cases no one else will take. Six of them run through this novel: a young man at a birthday party in the Bellevue, a boy certified to adult court trying to get back to juvenile court, a Russian chiropractor charged with federal fraud, a longtime client back on a plea, a stationary engineer accused of an assault that may have been self-defense, and a man on trial for the murder of his oldest friend.
And Miranda, the colleague who rides with him to the juvenile jail, reads his briefs on the train, and moves her life into the narrow house one floor at a time.
Read it
Published by Bordeaux Street Books on September 22, 2026.
Advance copies
The next novel is called The Quakers. Advance reading copies go to this list before they go anywhere else. One message when there is something to say, and nothing in between.
Content notes
A sexual assault allegation is examined at trial, with nothing depicted on the page. Grief. Some explicit intimacy between adults. Incarceration and drug trade backstory. The book carries its own content notes page.
A note on the prose
The voice is deliberately spare. Questions end with periods instead of question marks. Numbers, times, and street names are spelled out. Repetition is used as rhythm. None of it is a typographical error.
About the author
Daniel Salvati was born in Philadelphia and has lived there all his life. His time in the world of public defense runs quietly through his fiction. The Trinity is his first novel.