Matthew R. Hall (1967–)

When one woman has to contend not only with conspiracy, obfuscation and corruption in high places but also antagonism and intimidation from colleagues and opponents alike, you would think that it's too much for one individual to manage. If you add in personal difficulties arising from divorce and psychiatric problems stretching out of childhood trauma you can be sure the odds are stacked against her.

And yet this is what Jenny Cooper, the newly appointed coroner to the fictional Severn Vale show more Dictrict in Bristol, has to face when she discovers that the suspicious deaths of two young offenders have not apparently been properly investigated by her deceased predecessor.

You might think that the flawed individual trying to right wrongs is a cliché in crime fiction, and you'd be right; but in this instance the conflicts Jenny has with both inner demons and corporate villains are entirely believable and gripping. The Coroner emerges, for all its 400-plus pages, as a real page-turner.

As an official who's responsible for holding inquests into violent, sudden, or suspicious deaths Jenny has to confront not just rather graphic pathology reports but occasionally a post mortem. But worse than either are some of the humans she encounters: an aggressive local authority official, an obstructive pathologist, sneering lawyers and devious corporate types. She also has to contend with suspicious colleagues, distressed relatives and a critical ex-husband. Luckily she has individuals who she can turn to, if she can but trust them---an investigative journalist, a neighbourly dropout, a more sympathetic pathologist, even a hacker---but it's those inner demons that too often stand in her way and, in particular, a childhood experience she's understandably unwilling to contemplate.

The Coroner is a police procedural in all but name, lacking a police officer as its main protagonist: instead we have a lone official whose job is to investigate and ask pertinent questions in order to establish the truth surrounding unnatural deaths. The author is a former criminal barrister (there is a lovely bit of metafiction when Jenny, whose background is in family law, disparages criminal barristers) and so the legal, and sometimes illegal, processes which our coroner goes through have the ring of truth. Further, there is an undercurrent of politics here in implicit criticisms of a system that allows private delivery of a public service for profit, with subsequent lack of transparency and genuine accountability.

In addition, living as he does on the England/Wales border Matthew Hall is well aware of the rivalry between the two nations, and Jenny's dual existence---living in Wales while working in Bristol and commuting over the old Severn Bridge---means that she has to successfully balance private life and public duty or risk disaster. The quiet Wye valley near Tintern is a world away from the busy streets and impersonal suburbs of a fictional Bristol region, but trouble seems to find her wherever she is.

Having such a fragile and, admittedly, at times irritating individual to head up a series (four novels so far) ensures we have some sympathy for her, but even as we will her to succeed we know that, although she may win one battle, the war with corruption and criminality will continue regardless. A clever and thoughtful piece of crime fiction, then, rather less a whodunit than a case of establishing how and why. show less

This was a random library choice which has now started another series love.
The fact that Jenny is flawed only made her more likeable and appear courageous in the face of some scary stuff. She has become to me one of those rare characters.... the one you wish you knew in real life.
My only gripe was that she starts a fling....but that is probably only envy speaking. One unanswered question bugs me too....who was Kevin Knight ?
Really absorbing story. Read it over the course of quite a few show more nights but it was like getting into a bubble bath after a stressful day . show less

Jenny Cooper is a UK coroner who agrees to open an inquest on two young Muslims who disappeared years previously. Her battle to find the truth is obstructed from all sides - the families who just want the past to remain so; the families who are too caught up in grief to see how they damage their cause; the security services who seem to have a stake in the outcome; the police who perhaps did a less than stellar job in investigating the disappearances at the time. This is a bleak book where show more every character has flaws and demons that attack their ability to do the right thing, make them lie or push them to the edge of madness with the 'heroine' perhaps the most dysfunctional of them all. The workaday start to the story - well, workaday for someone who deals in dead people - builds slowly to a complex interplay of psychological and actual violence with plenty of twists, although none of these are out of context. As life often is, the ending is satisfying, final and with loose ends that do not all make sense. show less

The Airbus A380, a behemoth of the skies, is the latest and greatest in terms of technology, supposedly virtually free of human error. How then to explain Ransome Airways Flight 189's fatal plunge into the Severn Estuary shortly after take-off from Bristol International Airport? That's not really what coroner Jenny Cooper is asking though. Her remit is supposedly the death of a sailor who happened to be on the water when the plane hit, taking him out as well. But then Jenny discovers that show more her investigation of the sailor's death (and the grieving parents of a child who had been travelling unaccompanied on the plane and was found near the sailor) is raising some questions that the authorities don't seem to want to answer…

I really enjoyed this book. Despite it being the fourth volume in an ongoing series, of which I had not read any of the previous volumes, I was able to follow along with the characters' backstory all right and felt quite at home in the fictional Bristol and environs. I do admit to getting a bit muddled with the geography, especially when Jenny travelled to Wales for some things, but nothing that a good map of the area couldn't fix.

I also LOVED the airplane bits. Some may find the technical details about the crash excessive or nerdy, but they were actually the main reason I wanted to read this book, so I waded through them quite happily. The ending seemed a bit helter-skelter and bonkers, but that could just have been my eyeballs tripping over themselves trying to read as fast as possible. It's definitely a fast read, even with the technical details.

I'd recommend this for aviation enthusiasts and those who like their mysteries with female protagonists. Fans of the Canadian show Da Vinci's Inquest, which is also about a coroner coming to grips with society and his place in the world, may also want to see what Jenny Cooper is all about. show less