M R HallMacmillan, £10

The heroine of M R Hall’s debut novel is not your average coroner.

Jenny Cooper is a freshly divorced mother and her nervous breakdown, therapy and pill popping give her a better connection with some residents of Severn Vale than one might expect from an agent of the state.

She is also deeply frustrating – though Whitehall might say this is normal for coroners – as she does some quite harebrained things for someone who is supposed to have spent decades as a battling family law solicitor, and is expected to be the focal point for an area’s grief.

However, Hall writes a woman well, which is no mean feat for a man. This may be a skill gleaned from his background of criminal barrister-turned-screenwriter, but it still serves. Plot-wise, yes, The Coroner is full of cliches, but this is a procedural thriller with a twist – so the audience gets what it wants. And, though I did spend a lot of pages thinking that never in a million years would a real Jenny Cooper get or keep this job, Hall takes so many gleefully malicious swipes at barristers and their instructing solicitors, and other coroners, and pretty much everyone else involved in the system along the way, that this is (dark) pleasure to read.