Gagged and Bound (Trish Maguire 7) [Paperback]

Natasha Cooper is a devious plotter

In this deftly plotted thriller, thoroughly modern barrister Trish Maguire picks her way through a maze of lies...

Cooper is a thoughful writer about issues as well as people.

Srong charcterisation and sense of place put Cooper among the best in current crime writing.

Distinguished biographer Beatrice Bowman is being sued for libel by a new member of the House of Lords for implicating him in a thirty-year-old terrorist outrage. At the other end of the legal spectrum, a family of South London villains gags and suffocates those who try to expose their secrets. And Inspector Caro Lyalt has to decide what to do with information from a whistle-blower that could ruin a colleague's career - or her own. Caught in the middle of it all is barrister Trish Maguire.

As I wait for publication of the paperback of Gagged and Bound (21 August), I have been thinking back to the moment when the idea for the novel was born more than two years ago. My imagination had been triggered by the words of Sir Paul Condon, once Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, quoted in Graeme McLagan's Bent Coppers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson): 'I do have a minority of officers who are corrupt, dishonest and unethical. We believe, sadly, that they commit crimes, they neutralise evidence in important cases and they betray police operations...' Having read that, I found it impossible not to think of all the individuals whose work would be compromised by this kind of betrayal. So many of them must suspect (or even know) what's going on, but how many would actually talk? How many would prefer to keep their heads down and hope someone else would take the risks and sort out the mess? An imaginary whistleblower appeared in my mind one early morning, and!
I soon found myself liking her, even though I was sure she would have made a lot of enemies during her career. I began to weave my whole plot around her, inventing crimes and criminals to fit with what I wanted her to be. I saw that she would have to be disbelieved by everyone to whom she tried to report what she suspected, which often happens to whistleblowers in any profession. At the same time, she would have to represent such a threat to the criminals that they would do anything they could to silence her. When I started to write, I began to think of other, quite different, women whose knowledge might threaten the safety of people with a lot to lose. My old nightmares of saying or writing too much and causing untold trouble came back to haunt me, and I gave them (or something very like them) to one of the other characters....

An ex-publisher, past Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and lifelong Londoner, Natasha Cooper writes for a variety of newspapers and journals, including Crime Time and The Times Literary Supplement. She contributes to many radio programmes such as Woman's Hour and Saturday Review, and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the author of, among many others, FAULT LINES, PREY TO ALL and OUT OF THE DARK. 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'.