Synopses & Reviews
Barrister Trish Maguire tackles a thirty-year-old terrorism case when distinguished biographer, Beatrice Bowman, hires her to fight a libel claim by a new ennobled member of the House of Lords who says she misidentified him as one of the terrorists who killed a busload of young children.
Meanwhile, Trishs old friend, Inspector Caro Lyalt, faces an impossible decision---blow the whistle that could end a colleagues career (and jeopardize her own), or do nothing and never forgive herself. In the running for a fantastic new job within the police force, she learns that a South London crime family is paying off her biggest rival. The villains gag and suffocate anyone who tries to expose their secrets. If the allegations are false, she loses all hope of this job or any other, but if they are true and she does nothing, shell live with the guilt forever.
Trish is caught in the middle. As she and Caro help each other find the information they need, Caros top informant is shot. Then the body of a young woman turns up in a park, bound, gagged, and suffocated with all the trademarks of a mob killing. And someone is trying to use Trishs twelve-year-old brother to force her to drop her inquiry. Picking her way through the maze of lies and threats, she brings danger terrifyingly close to herself and the people she loves.
In her seventh thrilling Trish Maguire mystery, Natasha Cooper explores the full destructive power of the wrong words spoken at the wrong time.
Review
“Trish Maguire is a heroine for our times.” ---Val McDermid Praise for Natasha Cooper and her mysteries
“Natasha Cooper is a fiercely intelligent writer with a hotline to the darker side of modern life.” ---Crime Time
“Trish is an engaging character, warm and human, and well drawn.” ---Donna Leon, The Sunday Times
Keep Me Alive
“Gripping.” ---Publishers Weekly
A Place of Safety
“Cooper excels at depicting the effects of terror on the weak and the strong; happily, Trish is one of the latter.” ---Kirkus Reviews
“A dark and savage story with a deviously clever plot.” ---Booklist
About the Author
Natasha Cooper is an expublisher, past chair of the Crime Writers Association, and lifelong Londoner who sets her novels in the city that she loves. She also writes for a variety of newspapers and journals, and has contributed to many radio programs in the UK. She regularly speaks at crime writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, including an appearance as toastmistress at Bouchercon 2004. In 2002, she was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library, an award that goes to “the author whose work has given most pleasure to readers.”