Rankin Davis "The Right to Silence"
Hodder & Stoughton (0 340 65783 9) £16.99
Beth Gamble TV journalist returns
home from her night of triumph at the BAFTA awards and is raped in a particularly vicious
manner. She thinks she knows who the culprit is, so do the police, but at the trial
something curious happens: the case for the prosecution falls apart. The suspect walks
free and Beth is left with the trauma of rape, a blackened name and no job. Although
you’d think things couldn’t get worse for her, at this point they do when, at
her lowest ebb, she is contacted by a clandestine group dedicated to passing a fitting
sentence on rapists who walk free. Usually this involves castration and death. Beth is now
caught on the horns of a dilemma; which side is she on? Does she condemn the rapists or
the killers? Does she want justice or vengeance? Rankin Davis explores this question on many levels throughout the book. As Beth and her ex-cameraman Fergus try to find the truth behind the rapist’s acquittal they have to negotiate a morass of deception and expediency (which involves the police, politicians and terrorist organisations,) to get to the truth. And all the time the question to surface is - vengeance or justice? How is one to act when the system of justice has so obviously broken down that the rules just don’t work? The authors (Rankin Davis is a pseudonym for two barristers) obviously have an interest in presenting these problems to as wide an audience as possible. As well as giving us a plot that holds us they ask uncomfortable questions about the direction in which the British legal system is heading and although at times the quality of the writing flags they fulfil their aim. At a time when the right to silence is routinely used as a political football and the reality of the Secret Services being involved more closely with the police becomes imminent, the book throws a few timely questions at the reader. Definitely worth a read, the book never loses its grip even when the extent of the corruption and deception portrayed threatens to throw it into unreality. (R.L) Read the story behind the book.
