In her seventh outing, tenacious barrister Trish Maguire becomes embroiled in helping Beatrice Bowman, a distinguished biographer who is being sued for libel by a Lord over allegations that he was involved in a thirty-year-old terrorist bombing. Trish also gets dragged into helping her friend Inspector Caro Lyalt, who is trying to deal with PC Stephanie Taft’s allegations that a senior officer fraternises with a family of South London villains who gag and suffocate snitches. The senior officer in question is both the whistleblower’s ex and the person shortlisted for the same politically sensitive job as Caro – so will the accusations be construed as revenge or mudslinging? It all starts to get very personal – and dangerous – when Stephanie is conveniently shot to death in an uncover police operation, and Trish’s kid half-brother David starts receiving death threats.
The title ‘Gagged & Bound’ is doubly appropriate, referring both to the physical gagging and binding with which the South London gang silences its victims, and the attempts by a powerful Lord to use a libel case to gag a biographer’s career-threatening allegations. It’s slightly questionable whether someone as busy, strong-willed and independent as Trish would so readily take on the burden of Beatrice Bowman’s libel case without any compensation; but it does make Trish thoroughly likeable: the sort of friend anyone would want, either inside or outside a courtroom.
All the plot threads are carefully woven, without a stitch being dropped. And whereas many good crime novels deliver a punch on the last page, this one delivers a knockout in the last sentence.
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Julian Maynard-Smith
Natasha Cooper is the best-known pseudonym of Daphne Wright. As Natasha Cooper she originally wrote light-hearted romantic mysteries (the Willow King/Cressida Woodruffe series), followed by the darker Trish Maguire novels, which delve into social issues. Recently, as Clare Layton, she has written psychological thrillers that explore the long-term effects of violent crimes.