"People do not move on. They move to a different place dragging their baggage behind them like wheelie suitcases and bearing their scars."
Two inexplicable suicides have coroner Martha Gunn working overtime. The first, young and beautiful Gina Marconi, a 36-year-old barrister who was due to be married. She specialized in criminal law and had an 8-year old son. What on earth would make Gina drive her car at 60 miles an hour into a stone wall at 3 am? The second, a 12-year-old boy, Patrick Elson, who dives off the A-5 bridge into heavy traffic. Patrick was sweet, smart and being raised by a single mom. Definitely there must be a very sad story behind that leap.
Martha Gunn, the coroner for Shrewsbury, is a medical doctor whose job is to investigate the circumstances surrounding a death, hold an inquest, and make a determination about whether or not the death was from natural causes, accidental, homicide, suicide etc. She is not the one who performs the postmortem exam, but is more like a detective piecing together all the facts and nuances of a particular case. From the outset, Martha is convinced that somehow the two suicides have some connection or are linked despite the disparities in the victims. She usually investigates these situations with her close friend and colleague, DI Alex Randall, but he has been sidelined due to the unexpected death of his mentally ill wife, Erica. Because of their connection, Martha recuses herself from looking into Erica's death, and she finds herself without his guidance as she tries to put all the pieces together with the suicide cases.
This was the first book in this series I've read, and as it was #7, I was afraid I'd be totally lost. I didn't find that to be true, however, as the author provides some necessary backstory and it was easy for me to slot myself into Martha's life. I was pulled in immediately by her character and work ethic and found all the details of how the coroner works alongside the police and the pathologist to be quite interesting but it seems to be different to how this works in the USA. Regardless, I really liked following alongside Martha as she goes with the clues and digs into the lives of the victims to find out what may have driven them to their deaths. I really want to go back and read the first six books and definitely will be on the lookout for the next in the series.
Thank you to NetGalley and Severn House for the e-book ARC to read and review.
This is book #7 in a long running series about coroner Martha Gunn. It worked as a standalone for me, but I definitely want to read from the beginning as I really liked this character and writing.
Genre - police procedural, mystery and detective novel
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