Category Archives: M R Hall

Review: The Disappeared by M R Hall

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The Disappeared is the second novel to feature Jenny Cooper, a somewhat troubled Coroner in Bristol, and follows on from last year’s The Coroner. Mrs Jamal is the mother of one of two young Muslim man who disappeared eight years previously and she approaches Jenny Cooper to beg her to conduct an inquest now that her son has been legally presumed dead. The official story is that the two men left the country for Afghanistan after becoming radicalised but Mrs Jamal does not believe this and wants Jenny to uncover the truth. In agreeing to look into the matter Jenny is confronted by roadblocks put in place by several arms of bureaucracy including the police who investigated originally and the always shadowy secret service.

The things that I liked most about the first book such as the genuine courtroom tension and the development of Jenny Cooper as a complex but engaging character were, for me, largely absent from The Disappeared. The story was serviceable enough but never fully engaged the ‘must know what will happen next’ part of my brain because it seemed fairly obvious from the outset what the overall outcome would be. The set pieces that took place along the way, including those in the courtroom, were competently written but, for me, failed to surprise and felt too much like they’d been assembled from a few newspaper headlines rather than looking at any particular theme or idea in any depth. Issues like the treatment of Muslims after September 11 2001 and the reaction of western governments to the growth of extreme terrorism were given lip service which brought out nothing new or insightful and left me unfulfilled.

I could deal with Jenny Cooper being unlikable or unsympathetic but not incredible. At some points here I struggled to believe she’d be given a driver’s license let alone responsibility for an important legal proceeding. She made illogical and sometimes daft decisions that I suppose we all do but it somehow didn’t ring true. Her continuing unwillingness to deal with her medical problems sensibly, which in turn meant she couldn’t seem to deal sensibly with any of the significant people in her life – be it her son, her part-time lover or her closest colleague – left me cold. The rest of the characters weren’t given much to do other than feed Jenny’s paranoia, with the exception of Mrs Jamal who was quite brilliantly drawn as a mother desperate for answers but we didn’t see enough of for my liking.

The Disappeared isn’t terrible but I just didn’t find it very original or thought-provoking. I suspect if I had read it several years ago, when my crime fiction diet was more bland (Cornwell, Reichs, Patterson etc) I’d have thought it jolly good but having spiced up my reading over the past few years I think I want more than a mildly interesting but quickly forgotten story. I did enjoy the first book in this series though so I may be tempted to give book 3 or 4 a go (apparently both are due next year).

What about the audio book?

Sian Thomas is terrific. I’m normally wary of narrators who choose to do foreign accents (they can border on the offensive) but it was well done here and at times the best thing about the fairly dull courtroom scenes.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As always, don’t take my word for it. The Disappeared has been more favourably reviewed at Euro Crime

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Sian Thomas
Publisher BBC WW [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 12 hours 25 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Source I bought it

Review: The Coroner by M R Hall

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Title: The Coroner

Author: M R Hall

Publisher: Macmillan [2009]

ISBN: 978-0-230-71127-3

No. of pages: 422

Jenny Cooper is the newly appointed Coroner for the Severn Vale district of England. Her predecessor died suddenly after dealing with the deaths of two young teenagers who had both spent time in a local youth correctional facility. One, a young boy, was reported to have committed suicide while at the institution and a young girl died seemingly of a heroin overdose shortly after her own stint in the same place. Cooper, recently divorced and recovering from a breakdown and the onset of anxiety attacks, becomes convinced that something untoward led to the two cases being closed so quickly and decides to re-open the investigations.

The book doesn’t fit neatly into any of the established crime fiction sub genres as it tackles the solving of crime from the perspective of a Coroner which, in England, is still a purely legal position similar to a judge or magistrate (in the US the role has in many jurisdictions merged the legal aspects of the job with the medical examiner’s duties). The book does a great job of highlighting this rather unique role in modern justice where the only goal is to determine a person’s cause of death and any criminal charges that might arise from that finding are someone else’s responsibility. Hall does maintain a decent level of tension and interest in what could have become a dry subject bogged down in legal minutiae.

My problem with the plot didn’t lie in the legal details but rather in what felt to me like a bit of overly forced leading of readers down an emotional path. The victims are depicted in a fairly one-dimensional and stereotypical way. The only sense we’re given of them is that they were both troubled, the young boy who died while in custody particularly so, but there’s no real sense of them as individuals. Occasional passages showing the young boy’s mother to be less than perfect, although loving, seemed to have been inserted almost as a dare to readers, and indeed to Cooper herself, to be anything other than outraged at the treatment of the young people. However it always felt like Cooper’s primary goal was her own crusade to get her life back together and the book didn’t give me enough to develop anything more than a detached curiosity about the resolution of the investigations. It tried, I think, to build a real sense of the injustices that can occur within a poorly funded justice system where no one is overtly evil but everyone is too consumed with protecting their own interests than in finding out the truth but I never quite bought it.

The female characters in this book are well developed and depicted. Jenny Cooper’s struggle to function normally while dealing with her depression and anxiety is very credibly portrayed. At times in her professional work however she’s utterly naïve and as petulant as a 4-year old which I found pretty unrealistic for someone who is supposed to have been a family lawyer in the public system for 15 years. Having divorced her controlling husband and barely maintaining a relationship with her own teenage son she develops some new relationships with other women including Alison, her Court Officer who she treats quite shabbily to begin with, and a journalist whose been looking into one of the cases that Cooper decides to re-open. Her supposed love interest, Steve the ageing hippy, didn’t really ring true for me and in fact most of the men are either evil, incompetent or irrelevant which is interesting for a book written by a bloke (cannily using his initials to disguise that fact).

I first added this book to my ‘must read’ list after hearing it discussed with much praise on the BBC 5 Live Books Podcast back in January. This undoubtedly led to me having quite high expectations which is something I try to avoid because, as happened here, the book didn’t quite live up to them. It was by no means bad, and I’ll certainly look out for the next one in the series which is apparently due out in December, but I did feel that parts of the plot were designed too pointedly to elicit outrage without much genuine emotion on offer within the story itself. However the portrayal of a little-known arm of the judicial system was first rate and I think Hall has a real ability to create interesting characters, at least female ones.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at It’s A Crime! (Or a Mystery)

Reviewed by Maxine at Euro Crime

Reviewed by Sunnie at Aust Crime Fiction

For a different view of this fascinating role within our judicial systems you could try one of my favourite Aussie crime shows on TV. State Coroner ran for two seasons in the late 1990′s and took place in a fictional state Coroner’s Court. It has some fine Aussie Actors (Wendy Hughes in the title role) and the first season is available on DVD for those interested.