Natasha Cooper
Audio Tape Soundings (2003) |
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A Place of Safety
Barrister Trish Maguire needs all the time she can find to help her young half-brother adjust to life after the violent death of his mother. Sir Henry Buxford, an influential acquaintance, has other ideas. He asks Trish to investigate one of his private charities, a magnificent art collection built up before 1914 and lost for most of the 20th century.
Taking a crash course in the murkier aspects of the art world, Trish is determined to unlock the secrets she is sure are hidden in the collection. Her research takes her not only into the heart of an engrossing love story, but also the agonising reality of life in the trenches of the First World War. She soon discovers a web of deceit that has spanned the decades since, catching all kinds of people in its filaments.
Marie McCarthy has worked extensively in repertory at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, Liverpool Playhouse, Churchill Theatre and The Salisbury Playhouse. Her West End credits include Dangerous Obsession, Beauty and the Beast, and London Cuckolds. She also appeared in the fifth series of Red Dwarf for BBC 2 and worked on a short film entitled The Bar. Radio credits include Waiting and Double and Quits for LBC.
7 Cassettes Running Time: approx. 9 hrs
About The Author
Clare Layton is another pseudonym of Natasha Cooper, who was born in London and educated at a Berkshire convent, worked in publishing for ten years before leaving to write full time. Her first crime novel, written under the name Natasha Cooper, was Festering Lilies published in 1990, the year she joined the Crime Writers’ Association. The millennium saw her taking the chair of the CWA and publishing both Prey to All, her tenth crime novel, and Clutch of Phantoms, her first foray into Clare Layton’s world of psychological suspense.
Barry Forshaw wrote of Clutch of Phantoms: ‘Those who follow the impeccable thrillers of Natasha Cooper will be intrigued by the inauguration of a new nom de plume, Clare Layton… Cooper could not help but write a novel overflowing with psychological acuity under any name… As this brilliantly orchestrated piece moves towards its sombre finale, the reader is both beguiled by an intense novel of character and obliged to confront the myths and realities of how much we are in thrall to genetic inheritance.’
Simon Shaw called it ‘a tense and gripping thriller’ in the Mail on Sunday, and Ian Rankin wrote: ‘Clare Layton is one to watch: this is a gripping psychological thriller with above average intelligence from a writer who knows her stuff. Highly enjoyable and thoroughly recommended.’
Her first six Natasha Cooper crime novels form the tongue-in-cheek series that stars Willow King, a severe civil servant with a secret double life as glamorous romantic novelist, Cressida Woodruffe. They allowed Cooper to take a frivolously irreverent look at various institutions that affect life in Britain, and to challenge the lazy habits of those who make judgements about people on the basis of their appearance.
Creeping Ivy was something of a turning point, with Willow/Cressida taking only a walk-on role. That novel belongs to Trish Maguire, Cooper’s new heroine, who features in novels that are grittier and more realistic than the earlier series. Trish is a thirty-something barrister, specialising in family law. Reviews of Prey to All include: 'Trish is an engaging character, warm and human, and well drawn’ (Donna Leon, The Sunday Times); ‘Natasha Cooper possesses the ability to write some of the most dark and realistic crime novels around’ (Birmingham Post); ‘Cooper’s novels are a welcome alternative [to the violence of much recent crime fiction]: convincing and hard-hitting, they explore how ordinary people get caught up in appalling events’ (The Times); ‘Natasha Cooper is another writer who deals with real life. Trish Maguire, a lawyer, is a flesh and blood character with a likeable personality…The ending of this accomplished novel is both bitter and believable’ (Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph).
In the late 1990s, Cooper decided to add an extra dimension to her writing life, looking not so much at current crime and investigation as at the long-term effects of violence on perpetrators, sufferers, and their friends and family. In order to distinguish these novels from her others, she writes them as Clare Layton. The first, Clutch of Phantoms, is a two-hander. One of the principal characters is 74-year-old Livia Claughton, just out of prison after an extended life sentence for the murder of her husband and his mistress. The other is her grand-daughter, a 27-year-old hotshot City trader, who believes her grandparents died in a car crash. Their developing relationship, as well as the friendship Livia makes with an 11-year-old arsonist, and Cass’s dealings with Christopher Bromyard, make this novel warm as well as hard-hitting.
The second Clare Layton novel (which is about Ginty Schell, a thirty-year-old freelance journalist investigating not only her own past and character, but also rape, the self-protecting instincts of the establishment and the difficulties faced by men in a world in which their traditional skills and attitudes are no longer needed) was published in paperback by HarperCollins at the end of 2001. She is now at work on her third.
In addition to her two novel-writing personae, she also reviews for a variety of newspapers and journals, including Crime Time and The Times Literary Supplement. She regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences and on the radio, and participated at a debate at the Oxford Union on the James Bulger murder. She is a member of The Unusual Suspects. In 2002 she was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library, an award that goes `to the author whose work has given most pleasure to readers’. Her main interests outside work lie, as readers of her early crime novels may guess, in food and wine. She is a good cook and an even better eater, and she believes that one of the greatest pleasures in life is to sit over a leisurely meal with friends, talking….a lot.
Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.
A Place of Safety
(Soundings,
2003)
Dec 03
A Place of Safety
by Natasha Cooper
