Tangled Web UK Review March 2007
A Greater Evil by
Natasha Cooper
hbk out March 07
Published by Simon Schuster
at £17.99
It was Creeping Ivy that introduced us to Trish Maguire, lawyer with a social
conscience, and in Cooper's own words turned her towards "grittier and more realistic
novels". The latest novel in the series is no exception.
Sam Foundling is a sculptor with an abusive past that has left him a flawed and
difficult character. When he is found cradling his brutally beaten wife in his arms, he is
naturally the suspect in the case. Cecilia Mayford dies, but their child is saved. Trish
Maguire is already involved with Foundling because his natural mother who abandoned
him at birth has contacted him again. She however is in prison on a charge of murdering
her two-year-old son. What Maguire had failed to realise when the sculptor contacted her
was that she had known him even earlier. Seventeen years ago, at the start of her own
career, she had rescued him through the courts from abusive foster parents. Now she
must try and prove him innocent of murder.
Trish Maguire's own life, meanwhile, is far from straightforward. Her partner
finds himself on the opposite side in an insurance case involving dangerous cracks
appearing in a brand new landmark building. The same case where Maguire originally
came across Cecilia Mayford. And to make matters worse, Maguire's closest friend,
Chief Inspector Caro Lyalt, is in charge of Cecilia Mayford's murder case. Under
pressure from above, Lyalt loses her temper with Maguire as she tries to convince Lyalt
of Sam's innocence. Maguire is sure there are more sinister forces at play in Cecilia
Mayford's death.
Cooper deliberately plays around with layers of apparent coincidence at all levels
of this story. Not only do the professional and personal lives of all the protagonists cross
and recross, but also the strands of their lives are reflected one in the other. Sam was an
abandoned child who didn't know his parents. His wife, Cecilia, never knew her father
because Gina, her mother, kept it a secret. And the nature of the main characters is
mirrored by the nature of the new building that forms part of the story. Why is this
structure cracking up? What trouble lies beneath the showy exterior? Sam Foundling is
a difficult person to like, but should that prevent us from accepting his innocence? With
him, Cooper challenges the norms of the genre, and creates in the process characters who
are three-dimensional. Moreover, are all the events merely coincidental? Or do they
amount to something more sinister, as the cover blurb suggests? Cooper subtly teases us
with all these coincidences, which in a lesser book would be unacceptably unreal. And if
murder is, to paraphrase Aristotle, the greater evil, is there a lesser and acceptable evil?
Natasha Cooper and Trish Maguire at their best.
(
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger)
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