Book description
Fruiting Bodies is a compelling novel featuring female sleuth, Willow
King, set within the fraught corridors of an NHS hospital. Just as
Willow is giving birth to her first child, her obstetrician is found
dead, face-down in his own birthing pool. To her he has always been
charming, supportive and reassuring, but someone hated him enough to
hold his head under water until he drowned. She has to find out why. Her
husband, Superintendent Tom Worth, warns her that it is neither easy nor
safe to pre-empt a police murder investigation, but Willow cannot stop.
Interviewing a hospital administrator at one moment and a leading member
of WOMB (Women Overtake Male Birthing) the next, Willow starts to find
out what lay behind the obstetrician's façade of charm and professional
competence. When she and her baby are released form hospital, the scope
of her enquiry widens. But she soon discovers that Tom was right and, in
a violent confrontation, she pays a high price for her curiosity. In
Fruiting Bodies Natasha Cooper once more mixes an entertaining,
light-hearted mystery with a sidelong glance at some of the more
intractable antagonisms of contemporary life and a shrewd psychological
insight into the minds of those who love, those who hate, and those who
cannot believe that they have to abide by the same rules as the rest of
us. Natasha Cooper lives in London and writes for a variety of
newspapers and journals. She was Chairman of the Crime Writer's
Association in 2000/01 and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences
on both sides of the Atlantic. N. J. is the author of the Trish Maguire
series and has also written psychological suspense novels as Clare
Layton.
