Keep Me Alive by
Natasha Cooper
pbk out June 05
(Pocket Books)
at £6.99
Natasha Cooper again introduces here feisty woman barrister Trish
Maguire into a complex story with several strands. It begins with the later
stages of a civil trial where Will Applewood is acting as a sample case for
thirty small food suppliers, who allege that they have been shafted by a
huge supermarket chain, who dangled lucrative contracts before them,
then after the firms had over-stretched themselves in buying the necessary
equipment, offered them derisory terms which bankrupted them.
During a vital part of the trial, Trish gets struck down by food poisoning
and her CID pal who shared the sausages almost dies. Will, who is sweet
on Trish, sets out to discover the origins of the bangers and gets involved
with a meat scam where dud carcasses from a Kent abattoir are flown
over to Normandy for processing. An investigative journalist friend of
Wills gets murdered because he was covertly filming the racket.
Meantime another sub-lot is running in; the sick detective was trying
to nail a child abuser and gets Trish to take over part of the investigation.
The whole story is complicated by her senior counsel always trying to get
her into bed. There was a slight problem, common in series of books, in
that not having read the previous one, the significance of some references
to Trish's past history remained obscure, such as her relationship
withnher father. In fact, the behaviour of most of the lead characters
seems to be made attributable to some events in their childhood or
earlier life.
Natasha Cooper's writing is impeccable and this one gives her an
opportunity to sound off about the iniquities of the supermarkets and the
horror of modern meat processing, especially since the intrusive
bureaucracy of the EU has made it even more distressing for animals,
who have to be carted all over the country to be killed since small
slaughterhouses have been closed.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
Keep Me Alive by
Natasha Cooper
