Product Description

When lawyer, Jenny Cooper, is appointed Severn Vale District Coroner, she’s hoping for a quiet life and space to recover from a traumatic divorce, but the office she inherits from the recently deceased Harry Marshall contains neglected files hiding dark secrets and a trail of buried evidence.

Could the tragic death in custody of a young boy be linked to the apparent suicide of a teenage prostitute and the fate of Marshall himself? Jenny’s curiosity is aroused. Why was Marshall behaving so strangely before he died? What injustice was he planning to uncover? And what caused his abrupt change of heart?

In the face of powerful and sinister forces determined to keep both the truth hidden and the troublesome coroner in check, Jenny embarks on a lonely and dangerous one-woman crusade for justice which threatens not only her career but also her sanity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31454 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 450 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Many are the debuts in the crime fiction field that create a brief flurry of interest then sink without trace. It’s a fairly safe bet, however, that MR Hall’s The Coroner won’t suffer that fate – this is a fresh and original piece of work that is already gleaning a fair measure of praise. Hall has worked extensively in television on such successful series as Judge John Deed, Kavanagh QC and Dalziel and Pascoe, and the expertise gained there is parleyed into very impressive results here.

The beleaguered heroine, Jenny Cooper, is not in the best of shape. She has been recently divorced, and has suffered a nervous breakdown. But Jenny is hoping that her new job – Coroner for the Severn Vale -- will get her life back on an even keel. Living on a desperate diet of anti-depressants and downers, she finds herself involved in looking into something worrying: the deaths of several teenagers at local detention centres. Has her predecessor neglected some crucial information in this area? As Jenny digs deeper, she encounters a solid wall of bureaucratic resistance. But however screwed up her own life is, Jenny is not going to give up on the uphill task she’s set herself.

We have, of course, encountered the troubled, damaged protagonist before, many times – both in male and female form. But such is M R Hall’s skill that even in this over-familiar territory, cliché is kept firmly at bay. Hall has experience of the world of the coroner, and that gives the book (the first in a series) a pithy verisimilitude. But so compelling is the narrative voice in The Coroner, that readers will be keen to enter the messy, conflicted world of Jenny Cooper again. --Barry Forshaw

Review
`A gripping debut novel'
--Daily Express

Review
'An outstandingly interesting first novel.'

Customer Reviews

Cliched? Yes. Full of Stock characters? Yes - and yet.....
The tag line on the front of this book is 'I'm a Coroner. I spend my life laying things to rest'. We are introduced to the new Coroner of Severn Vale. Her name is Jenny Cooper, newly divorced and recovering from a breakdown, her teenage son lives with his father and new girlfriend and it is made clear from the very start of the book that Jenny has some deep childhood trauma in her life that has affected her personality and made her doubt herself and her abilities.

OK so we have the usual maverick type person, knocking back tranquilizers and wine as if they are going out of fashion, full of angst and generally falling apart and I felt a weariness of spirit come upon me and thought Do I really really want to read this? Do I really want to end up feeling as if I too would like to put my head in the gas oven? (As I am all electric decided there was no danger so on I went). I persevered and glad I did as I gradually became drawn into the story. Jenny's curiosity is aroused by the previous coroner's behaviour prior to his death and the fact he was trying to get to the bottom of the death of a teenager who had committed suicide in a young offender's institution. Then there was the drug related death of a young teenage girl, another suicide, seems a clear open and shut case, but as with all good crime stories, we begin to doubt that all is as it seems and Jenny decides to investigate further.

Once again, the usual stock characters pop up, the local businessman and Member of the Council, obnoxious and pompous who does not want Jennie to get involved, he is clearly on the make and has been taking backhanders from the owners of the offender's facility who want to build a bigger and better commercially run building elsewhere; the policeman, ambitious and ruthless who has skimmed over the investigation into the teenage girl's drug induced death; a slimy lawyer and an investigative journalist seeking a good story.

As she digs deeper into the mystery and cover up nasty things begin to happen to Jenny and her friends and her new lover, but the reader knows that ultimately she will find the guilty party. She does but it is not quite such a clear cut ending as normal and we are left with characters who are obviously going to reappear in the next story of what we are told is 'a fantastic new series heroine who takes on the establishment in a search of truth and justice whilst dealing with a very broken personal life'.

I always feel if you are going to use a cliche or two, then you may as well go the whole hog and The Coroner certainly does not hold back in this regard. And yet, and yet - I found myself becoming more and more engrossed with this story, I began to feel great sympathy for Jennie and though there were times when I felt like screaming DON'T DO THAT as I could see disaster just around the corner, ultimately this turned into a real page turner and one that I thoroughly enjoyed, despite my initial doubts. The final scene in the court room was very exciting and extremely filmic and I did my usual trick of casting actors in the various roles - already have an idea for Jennie - and I find that I can recommend this book to you as a good start to the series and I am looking forward to the next one.

I had assumed, that like JK Rowling, M R Hall was a woman as the book is certainly written from a woman's viewpoint and is sympathetic to Jenny's unhappiness and vulnerability. However, I have just checked and have discovered that he is "a screenwriter and producer and former criminal barrister, a profession he left due to a constitutional inability to prosecute".

So now we know.

Extremely tedious.....
There cannot be very many books in which all of the principal female characters, and the majority of the male, are portrayed as woefully inadequate - personally and/or professionally - but this is certainly one of them! I struggled on to the bitter (but obvious) end despite having to suspend any belief in the various characters and would have to agree with other reviewers who found the book cliched and predictable. As is stated elsewhere the only scenes that work are in the courtroom and even then you would not want to make any comparison with (say) John Grisham; it is hardly gripping stuff, even at its best. Otherwise, the plot lacks credibility and the interaction between The Coroner herself and almost everyone else is completely unrealistic. I will not be looking out for the sequel!

not a face paced thriller................
if you like a good thriller , this is not the book for you , it is very slow and i lost interest after the first few chapters, like other reviewers have said you cant really get into the characters either, the ending was flat just like story all the way through really, so if you like a good who dun it stay clear !