The Flight

The fourth in MR Hall's series of crime novels involving Jenny Cooper finds the prickly district coroner thrown into a disaster zone after an Airbus A380 airplane crashes into the Severn Estuary a few minutes after leaving Heathrow airport. Cooper is forced onto the peripheries of the inquiry and required by both the conventions of office and, more importantly, by her twitchy superiors, to concentrate her energies on the deaths of just two of the disaster's victims - a passing sailor whose life is randomly claimed by the falling Airbus and a small child whose body is thrown from the stricken airliner. Never mind, for this is the territory where Cooper prefers to operate. She is a fearless, unstinting investigator, rarely happy with any scrap of information she picks up, and often content to chase her way up blind alleys in the pursuit of truth and justice. The Flight's author is also a successful screenwriter and it shows. Fans of Hall's previous TV work (his credits include episodes of Kavanah QC and Dalziel and Pascoe) will adore the slow fuses he lights in almost every chapter of this convincing novel.