When social worker Kara Huggate fails to show up to in court, the chief witness in a children's home abuse case, barrister Trish Maguire knows something must be wrong. She had no idea that Kara was dead, the victim of a brutal rape and strangling. There have been other, similar rape/murders, and the preliminary police investigation indicated that Kara was just the unlucky victim of either the original killer, or a more vicious copycat.
But then Trish receives a letter from Kara, mailed the day of her death. In it she mentions a secret boyfriend, and asks Trish to take on the unfair dismissal case of a colleague, Blair Collons. Collons is a creepy little man who makes Trish's skin crawl even as she feels sorry for him. Collons is convinced that there's a huge conspiracy, involving developers and the police, and that they're behind Kara's death.
Even allowing for Collons' overactive imagination, it does seem as though something's not right. So, as Area Major Investigation pool Chief Investigator Bill Femur looks into the case, battling the entrenched attitudes of Kingsford police culture, Trish begins her own investigation. And what she discovers stuns her.
Cooper is best known for her Willow King novels - a series that follows the cases of a dowdy public servant in the Department of Old Age Pensions who, out of hours, has a dual identity as the glamorous author of a number of best selling romance novels. Fault Lines is the first of what will undoubtedly be a series of Trish Maguire novels, and this heroine (though different from Willow) is no less engaging.
The mystery is well plotted, the characters well developed, and Cooper relies only a little on the miraculous discoveries and timely fortuitousnesses that so often litter this genre.
I once again cannot work out why the title was chosen - the cover shows a loop of phone cord, but phones don't feature in any prominent or significant way, and the murder wasn't caused by some unavoidable stress etc. I also didn't like one of Cooper's metaphor (wherein a 'tadpole of suspicion' evolves into a frog hopping around Maguire's brain), but that's a minor quibble.
I doubt I'll be running out to read the next installment, but if I come across it in the library I'll probably have a go. - Alex
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