The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Vaughan, Sarah. Anatomy of a Scandal. Emily Bestler Books, 2017.

Anatomy of a Scandal opens in 2016 with royal prosecutor Kate Woodcroft having just lost a case involving relationship rape. Kate is a committed advocate for the rights of the victims she encounters who often do not receive their fair share of justice from the courts. Her mood lifts when her clerk hands her a high-profile new case that will be sure to make her career. The figure at the center of the case is James Whitehouse a Conservative member of Parliament and government minister accused of rape by a female staffer with whom he had been having an extramarital affair. His wife Sophie is blindsided by his admission of infidelity on the even of exposure in the press, but decided for the sake of her children to stand by James throughout the ensuing trial.

Vaughan flashes back to Oxford University in the fall of 1992 in order to introduce the other main characters, namely Holly, Sophie's freshman tutorial partner, and Alison, the awkward, virginal Holly's vivacious new best friend. Alison and Holly are both from the North of England and are outsiders among the privileged, upper-class students like Sophie and her new boyfriend James, but studious Holly strikes an unlikely friendship with sport- and socially-minded Sophie based on their shared experience of having unfaithful fathers. Through her literature studies, Holly eventually comes to feel at home among Oxford's magnificent surroundings and ancient traditions, experiencing a happiness and sense of belonging that she has never known. At the same time, however, Alison has been having a difficult time being the only female math major among her classmates, which earns her their scorn and ridicule, and one night drinks so much that she passes out half naked on the toilet.

Holly's infatuation with Sophie deepens, and when Holly sees her together with James, she is smitten for the Adonis-like charmer. Holly has also begun to enjoy going out at night with Alison and has some male admirers interested in her romantically, though she becomes obsessed with James and soon begins jogging every day for the chance to see him in row by during crew practice. That June, after final exams, Holly politely rebuffs a friend's advances and walks home having drank too much, and in her effort to stay upright nearly collides with James running across the quad. He does not remember her name, but begins making drunken advances that Holly at first reciprocates, but soon demurs from when James begins moving too quickly for her. Instead of obliging Holly's wish to cool things down, James pins her down with his weight and has sex with her. After her assault, Holly becomes withdrawn and unwilling to talk about it, even with Alison, and decides not to return to Oxford the following year. She moves back home to Liverpool and attends university there, changing her major to law and transforming her appearance in a way that makes her into a new person, which she asserts by changing her name to Kate.

Kate knows that James is lying in his defense, and that he took advantage of Olivia Lytton the same we had had done to her as Holly, and is able to rattle James's composure during her withering cross-examination of him. Despite Olivia's obvious pain and suffering from the incident, the handsome, charismatic James is able to convince the jury of his version of events that peg Olivia as an ambitious, unstable manipulator. During the trial, Sophie comes to doubt James's story, and when she confronts him, he defiantly admits committing perjury and not caring, and her realization that he could very well be a rapist ends her to consider taking the children and leaving him. But Sophie remembers how much of an upheaval it had been when her father finally left her mother, and admits she is afraid to risk losing her status and sense of self-worth and so stays despite her disgust.

Soon, James's unrepentant political opportunism finally convinces Sophie that he will never have a sense of integrity or accountability, which prompts her take action to make sure that James does not continue to escape reckoning. Sophie first alerts the liberal press about a story surrounding the true events behind the drug-related death of a friend of James and Tom from Oxford, a fellow member of their elite dining club, the same night in 1993 when Holly was raped. The novel ends in 2018 with Kate looking back on her tough loss the year before with the Whitehouse case, noting how Sophie had gotten a rapid divorce from James, who has a new young girlfriend. Her clerk enters with a twinkle in his eye and the day's newspaper in his hand, and gleefully gives it Kate to read the headline about the Prime Minister being questioned by police about the old Oxford death, with James the next police interview.