The Coroner

Review by Lucy Forde

I picked this book up from a second hand book stall as I’d finished a book and wanted to try a new author. Fortunately I’d picked up the first in the Jenny Cooper series – nothing more frustrating than starting a series half way through!

The book opens with the coroner signing off the death of two teenagers as suicide – one found dead in his cell at a young offenders unit, the other in the undergrowth close to the Avon Gorge. Within days the coroner for Severn Vale, Harry Marshall, is dead – natural causes?

Enter Jenny Cooper, a lawyer who specialised in family law; her life is not without complications; she is dependent on medication for ‘a psychiatric episode’ and therefore a tad unstable, she is also a divorcee with a teenage son who lives with his father, an arrogant, overbearing consultant. Just the kind of stability needed to become a District Coroner!

Whilst going through her new office she comes across the file relating to one of the teenage suicides. At first it isn’t obvious but could this have been left as a clue to Harry’s suspicion that all was not as it seemed. However, Jenny is more inclined to think that the haphazard nature of the office and general neglect is more likely to be because the former incumbent was losing the plot and maybe interest. Enter Alison, the coroner’s officer – an ex police officer with more than a little link to her previous role as a police officer and fiercely loyal to her former boss. She is not impressed when Jenny asks her to move into the coroner’s office rather than her hidey hole at the local nick – it is the start of a stormy relationship; the reader is never left in doubt as to where Alison’s loyalties lie.

Jenny gets a phone call from a local reporter hinting that the death in custody was not as it appeared and maybe she should look into the fact that the girl by the Gorge had been in the young offenders unit at the same time. A call that triggers a chain reaction where Jenny finds that evidence had been withheld, post mortem reports have been less than adequately presented. Someone, somewhere wants these two suicides to be given as little attention as possible, for the inquests to return suicide verdicts and move on! Of course this isn’t going to happen and we are led along the assault course that the coroner has to face to ensure that justice is seen to be done. Needless to say she is met with stonewalling from the authorities and to a degree by her officer who cannot accept that the police are not whiter than white! Jenny goes beyond what I believe to be the job of the coroner, add a touch of Miss Marple to the mix, which does not make her popular and subject to some rather unpleasant episodes.

There is a bit of a love interest but not enough to detract from the plot. It is unusual to read a book that is not necessarily a ‘happy ever after’ ending, albeit a satisfactory one. Jenny’s personal life is ever present and I wondered how she could cope, but cope she did. The ending leaves with a natural step towards ‘The Disappeared’, number two in the series and I am now hooked on the series. Jenny Cooper has turned out to be an unlikely heroine but it is refreshing to have a main character who is far from flawless; the storyline is creditable and held my attention throughout.

A good test of a book is if my daughter and I consider it worthy of a television series – this is; we’ve cast the main characters already and ordered the rest of the books in the series!