When forty-four-year-old civil servant and romance writer Willow King finds herself experiencing motherhood for the first time, to prove that she is not stuck at home, she begins investigating the murder of her obstetrician, only to become the killer's next target.

The Drowning Pool

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

COOPER, Natasha

Mystery

Minotaur Books

Sour Grapes

In a new mystery by the author of The Drowning Pool, a fatal hit-and-run "accident" leads Willow King and her youthful sidekick Emma into a dangerous investigation into the owner of the lethal automobile.

When Antonia Weblock's four-year-old daughter mysteriously vanishes from the local playground, Antonia calls in her cousin, barrister and child advocate Trish Maguire, for help, but Trish soon finds herself a suspect in the crime.

Creeping Ivy

St Martins Pr

The brilliant and idealistic Trish Maguire returns in a devastating case of corruption and conspiracy. In a particularly difficult case of alleged child abuse, Trish knows that the jury's decision hinges on the persuasive testimony of her friend and star witness, Kara Huggate. When Kara doesn't appear at the trial, she realizes that something must have gone terribly wrong. She returns to her chambers after court to find the police waiting for her with some horrifying news: Kara has been brutally raped and murdered. At first it seems as though her attacker was the Kingsford Rapist - a serial rapist and killer who has managed to elude the police. Then several inexplicable clues indicate that the murderer may have been a copy cat. Trish receives a letter from Kara, posted the night of her death, asking her to help a suspicious man named Blair Collons. Although Trish decides to help him out of loyalty and affection for her friend, she cannot understand why Kara cared so much for the paranoid and strangely obsessive Blair. Soon Trish finds herself mired in his unhappy story, with potentially devastating consequences. Fault Lines is a tense and disturbing examination of the power of corruption and the lengths to which people will go to protect themselves.

Fault Lines

Barrister Trish Maguire has too much on her plate: not only is she swamped with work, but her father has just suffered a heart attack and he's not likely to pull through. The last thing Trish needs now is a seemingly unsolvable case, one closer to her heart than she ever would have thought possible. But inconvenience has never stopped this tenacious, young lawyer from taking on a case. The woman Trish chooses to defend, Deb Gibbert, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering her father. With almost no one on her side, not even her public defender, Deb cannot hope to see the light of day ever again. That is, unless she can convince someone like Trish of her innocence. But Trish needs no convincing-upon hearing Deb recount the details of the night her father died, Trish comes to believe that circumstantial evidence convicted this innocent daughter and mother of four. Staying up nights in the intensive care unit to watch over her unconscious father gives Trish time to reflect upon the case against her client. As Trish delves deeper into the case, doubts begin to cloud her judgment: perhaps Deb is a ruthless killer who deserves her sentence. But Trish's nerves are stretched to breaking point when one of Deb's only supporters is shot dead at his own front door. With an unflagging faith in equal justice, Trish finds herself face to face with several truths, each tantalizing her further into a giant hall of mirrors. Prey to All is as rich in compassion as it is in anger, and the interwoven subplots turn what seems a simple case into a test of faith.

Prey to All

An eight-year-old boy comes running out of the dark to find barrister Trish Maguire one wet Sunday night. Just before he can reach her, he's knocked over by a skidding car. Fighting to save his life, the rescue team finds Trish's name and address sewn into the boy's clothes. The police are convinced that he must be her son-but Trish knows he can't be. Is he connected with one of her clients? Could he be a blood relation? And who has sent him to Trish? Recovering from a miscarriage, about to go to court with a career-changing commercial case, and missing her partner, George, who is 5,000 miles away, the last thing Trish wants is responsibility for a lost boy. But there is no one else. Her search for the boy's identity takes her to a brutal inner-city housing project, where she has to confront not only the reality of life for the poor and destitute, but also many of her own fears. News of a particularly brutal murder reaches her, and within hours she learns that her erratic father is the chief suspect. It will take all her resolution and integrity to pick her way through this maze. The gulfs between rich and poor-and between the heroically honest and those for whom life and the law are always negotiable-rip off the last of Trish's self-protective blinders. There are choices to be made and lives to be saved. Out of the Dark is a touching and gripping novel that looks unflinchingly at crime's most devastating consequences.

Out of the Dark: A Trish Maguire Mystery

Barrister Trish Maguire needs all the time she can find to help her young half-brother adjust to life after the violent death of his mother. Sir Henry Buxford, an influential acquaintance, has other ideas. He asks Trish to investigate one of his private charities, a magnificent art collection built up before 1914 and lost for most of the twentieth century. Taking a crash course in the murkier aspects of the art world, Trish is determined to unlock the secrets she is sure are hidden somewhere in the collection. Her research takes her not only into the heart of an engrossing love story, but also into the agonizing reality of the trenches of the First World War. She soon discovers a web of deceit that has spanned the decades since, catching all kinds of people in its filaments. Now, the innocent, the violent, and the victims all have to free themselves. And someone dies. With her trademark dexterity and hard-hitting suspense, Natasha Cooper brings us the unstoppable Trish Maguire in her most challenging and enthralling case to date.

A Place of Safety: A Trish Maguire Mystery

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

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, Trish’s old friend, Inspector Caro Lyalt, faces an impossible decision---blow the whistle that could end a colleague’s 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, she’ll live with the guilt forever. Trish is caught in the middle. As she and Caro help each other find the information they need, Caro’s 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 Trish’s 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.

Gagged & Bound: A Trish Maguire Mystery

Trish Maguire, secure in her job as a top corporate lawyer, has almost forgotten the harshness of her early career defending abused children. But when Sam Foundling, her first client, comes back into her life as an adult, she's forced to revisit those painful times. Now a brilliant sculptor, married to Trish's colleague Cecilia and expecting his first child, Sam seems to have gotten over the abuse he suffered as an adolescent. When Cecilia is found beaten to death in Sam's art studio, the police, including Trish's best friend Caroline, are sure that Sam is to blame. Trish, however, is not so quick to believe it. Is Sam merely a distraught husband, trying to hold it together for his newborn daughter, or was the horror of his past too much for him to overcome? Or did Cecilia's murder have something to do with the seemingly cursed London Arrow building, built on the mass grave of plague victims? In her eighth Trish Maguire mystery, Natasha Cooper shows all the emotional intelligence, strong characterization, and sense of place that have won her acclaim from both readers and critics.

Evil Is Done: A Trish Maguire Mystery

“I don’t know how you’ve survived at the Bar this long,” Anthony said to Trish. “Caring for your clients to the point of derangement is bad enough; but to start fretting over the opposition. . . . ” In spite of the barristers’ rule that any suitably quali?ed member of the Bar who is free to take an offered case must do so, QC Trish Maguire can’t quite understand how her head of chambers, Anthony Shelley, can accept a case defending the corrupt Clean World Waste Management company. So when the brilliant and cynical Anthony is nearly killed in an accident, Trish is faced with a painful dilemma: Does she take over the company’s defense, or threaten her hard-won career by refusing to appear in court against Angie Fortwell, the impoverished widow of a hard-working farmer? As Trish delves deeper into the case, she grows more and more troubled by a nagging thought: Was the explosion that killed Angie’s husband really an accident, or the result of sabotage? With all this going on at work, the last thing Trish needs is the possibility of explosions at home. Yet she can’t simply walk away from Jay, the clever but damaged fourteen-year-old boy who has attached himself to her family---especially when his mother is found beaten and close to death. A brilliant novel of crime and its consequences, A Poisoned Mind demonstrates the full range of Natasha Cooper’s emotional intelligence and storytelling powers.

A Poisoned Mind: A Trish Maguire Mystery

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