Tangled Web UK Review October 2009
No Escape by
Natasha Cooper
hbk out August 09
Published by Simon Schuster
at £17.99
Natasha Cooper has transformed herself into ‘N J Cooper’ for this first of a new series, to distinguish it from the previous ‘Trish Maguire’ books. Her new heroine is Karen Taylor, a forensic psychologist from Southampton and the scene of the action is the Isle of Wight, a somewhat novel location for crime stories.
Karen has been sent by her forbidding professor to work up a paper and develop her reputation, so that she can offer herself as an expert witness. To do this, she has been interviewing some psychotic prisoners who allegedly suffer from DSPD, the Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder.
The IOW subject is in Parkhurst Prison, being Spike Falconer, convicted of shooting a whole family at a picnic site. Karen camps out in a lonely cabin which used to be their childhood holiday cottage and the action spreads beyond the prison, to Spike’s dysfunctional family and to the intervention of a local detective chief inspector, Charlie Trench. Spike escapes and ‘the plot thickens’, as they say.
The book is written with the style and professionalism we have come to expect from Ms Cooper, who as a lifelong journalist and writer, has presumably had to bone up hard on psychology, neuro-psychology and some surgery, to attain the convincing grasp of those esoteric subjects. However, this is no academic treatise, as there is violence, child-kidnapping and a power-boat explosion to excite the reader. A jolly good read.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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