KEEP ME ALIVE

Trish Maguire, barrister and staunch defender of the weak (A Place of Safety, 2003, etc.), wonders whether it’s really better not to know how sausages get made.

The client, Will Applewood, was a small producer of foie gras and specialty meat products until an exploitative deal with a giant grocery store chain bankrupted him. Trish and her head of chambers, Antony Shelley, are suing the chain on behalf of the Will and other victims. When Trish and her good friend Caro, a police officer in the Child Protection Unit, are poisoned by bad sausages, Will eagerly offers to track down the producers. He’s obsessively certain that meat packers everywhere are skirting hygiene regulations. Trish, eager to keep her volatile client out of trouble while she and Antony work and flirt, must also find time to help Caro, recovering in the hospital, with a case of child abuse. Will investigates almost too well, connecting the bad sausages with a dead investigative journalist, until he and his new girlfriend, an employee of the suspect sausage company, are brutally beaten by a man whose neck Will breaks in self-defense—or so he says.

The suspense will keep readers from looking too closely at the coincidences, but nothing will distract them from the disgusting way one loose end gets tied up. It’s enough to make you a vegetarian.