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Martha Gunn is the coroner in the town of Shrewsbury. She is a widow with teenaged twins, a boy and a girl. Her son Sam has just been accepted at Liverpool Football Academy (which being an American I don’t quite understand, I assume it is like high school with an emphasis on what we call soccer). The young man is very athletic and is excited and yet a little fearful as well. He is concerned what to do if he doesn’t like it. He and his mother devise a code between them for text messages. As coroner, Martha sees some pretty sad cases. Her heart aches for a single mother whose son, aged 13 just like Martha’s own son, has been accused of attempted homicide. The boy had been bullied for years and when he decided to fight back he did so with a knife and seriously injured the ringleader of the pack of schoolyard bullies. Callum Hughes was slim, asthmatic and smaller than his classmates. When people started calling him psycho and sticking up for the bully, Callum's mother was devastated. Martha, who could not publicly take sides, is secretly afraid for the young boy who will be sent to a juvenile offenders’ institution. The prolific author created the character of Martha Gunn in an earlier novel. Martha herself is a well-rounded and intelligent character. We meet her son through her eyes and experience her motherly concerns. The daughter and au pair are not central to this outing. And Martha’s colleagues in the office, other than the officious Jericho Palfreyman, are not so well defined, but perhaps that will come in further novels in the series. Masters has created a wonderfully obnoxious character in Roger Gough, nicknamed 'Dread Nought', and his disreputable family. There are good cops, not so nice cops and the appalling guards at the institution. In some ways it is a difficult and unsettling book to read; there is heartbreak and remorse. The melancholy of the young, sensitive boy thrust into the pit of despair will touch the reader’s heart. The author has also written eight Joanna Piercy novels set in Staffordshire, and four medical standalone mysteries.
Reviewed by Lorraine Gelly, June 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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