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Book summary
In southeast London, a young mother has been accused of an unthinkable crime: poisoning her own child – and then leaving him to die.
The mother, Ellie, is secretive and challenging – she's had a troubled upbringing – but does that mean she's capable of murder?
Balancing the case with raising her disabled five-year-old son, criminal defence lawyer Sarah Kellerman sets out in desperate pursuit of the truth. But when her own child becomes unwell, Sarah realises she's been drawn into a dangerous game.
The mother, Ellie, is secretive and challenging – she's had a troubled upbringing – but does that mean she's capable of murder?
Balancing the case with raising her disabled five-year-old son, criminal defence lawyer Sarah Kellerman sets out in desperate pursuit of the truth. But when her own child becomes unwell, Sarah realises she's been drawn into a dangerous game.
Nayu's thoughts
Any thriller involving family life peaks my interest because it means
the stakes are even higher for the protagonist, and Sarah is no different. This
may make me seem weird but I enjoyed how tough life was for Sarah because I
believe it portrayed real life accurately. Being a single mother to any child
is tough, add in a child with developmental issues and Sarah has a mountain to
climb before you add in any other life issues. She didn't have the immediate
extra support from a spouse, which made her a stronger person, a quality that
impacted on how she dealt with Ellie's case. Sarah isn't alone, as she soon
discovers because when she needs help her friends are there for her, she just
has to let them in. Ben is a sweetie, and the hurdles he overcomes had me
tearing up as much as Sarah. While she provided him with a lot of stress, he was worth every frantic moment.
Her current case is full of twists, even if I did correctly guess a major one at the start of the tale, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of what happened next. There is a lot of thrilling drama that made me scared for Sarah, Ben, Ellie and young Finn who was at the heart of the story. Ellie didn't make life easy for Sarah, even when she seemingly agreed to some conditions Ellie then went off the rails a little because she didn't see that there were other ways of doing things, mostly because she didn't know options existed and she didn't trust anyone in authority to help her. Her story gave me a lot to think about, as here must be countless cases where a mother is incorrectly accused of hurting her child. The agony Ellie went through, and to a certain extent Sarah, was heartbreaking to read because their love for their child shone through their thoughts and actions.
FYI I didn't read the post Ruth wrote for me until after I'd written this review - I had no clue one of her children is a special needs child - I was too when I was little, but not in the same way, so I can understand a little of what life is like.
It was clear Ruth knew her subject matter inside out, and I enjoyed learning about family law. I confess to peeking at the end when I started the novel-I needed to know if it was a happy ending or not because I needed a feel good book. What I read had me even more intrigued so I kept reading from the front of the book until I naturally reached the end. There are characters I hated for being unsupportive and understanding, and those who were the complete opposite who made me cheer because both Sarah and Ellie need people like them in their lives.
Disclaimer: I don't gain anything by you using any of the links below.
Her current case is full of twists, even if I did correctly guess a major one at the start of the tale, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of what happened next. There is a lot of thrilling drama that made me scared for Sarah, Ben, Ellie and young Finn who was at the heart of the story. Ellie didn't make life easy for Sarah, even when she seemingly agreed to some conditions Ellie then went off the rails a little because she didn't see that there were other ways of doing things, mostly because she didn't know options existed and she didn't trust anyone in authority to help her. Her story gave me a lot to think about, as here must be countless cases where a mother is incorrectly accused of hurting her child. The agony Ellie went through, and to a certain extent Sarah, was heartbreaking to read because their love for their child shone through their thoughts and actions.
FYI I didn't read the post Ruth wrote for me until after I'd written this review - I had no clue one of her children is a special needs child - I was too when I was little, but not in the same way, so I can understand a little of what life is like.
It was clear Ruth knew her subject matter inside out, and I enjoyed learning about family law. I confess to peeking at the end when I started the novel-I needed to know if it was a happy ending or not because I needed a feel good book. What I read had me even more intrigued so I kept reading from the front of the book until I naturally reached the end. There are characters I hated for being unsupportive and understanding, and those who were the complete opposite who made me cheer because both Sarah and Ellie need people like them in their lives.
Disclaimer: I don't gain anything by you using any of the links below.
Links to buy
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Guest Blog Post by Ruth Mancini
Book Extract: Chapter 1
 |
| Here's Ruth! |
Tell us about yourself…
I was born in South-West London and grew up in Hertfordshire
and Essex. After doing a languages degree, I got my first job in publishing,
where I worked for several years. I then went on to re-train as a lawyer, but I
also knew that I wanted to write. I’ve been an avid reader all my life and was
very much influenced by the strong, bold women I read about – Jo March in Little Women, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles to name but a few. I had two brothers who
were very close in age to me and there was a lot of competition between us,
which I think spurred me on to become a bit of an achiever - my mother says I
was never going to let the boys do something without doing it too! The deeper reality is that I could see a big
difference in the way that they were treated by virtue of having been born
male, and it made me angry. Everyday sexism and other kinds of social injustice
continued to bother me through my teens and into my twenties, and this influenced
both my writing and my choice of career.
I met
my husband in my early thirties and now juggle my work as a criminal defence
lawyer with writing and raising my two children. My eldest child is severely
learning disabled and autistic so, as you’d expect, that’s added an extra layer
to the difficulties all women face in trying to balance family with career. But
I truly love all my jobs! Every day is interesting, if exhausting, and I feel
incredibly fortunate to have found my way to this point in my life, and to the
place I needed to be.
… And about
your books?
In the Blood is a crime thriller and was inspired in
part by a real-life case. I was waiting in court one morning when a young woman
was brought up from the cells. The charge was murder, the victim her newborn
child. I’ve dealt with many cases over the years involving maternal child
neglect or physical abuse, but the facts of this one were unusual and it really
stayed with me. As this wasn’t my case
or my usual court, that was where my brief involvement was to end. But the
spark that ignites a story had been lit.
I can’t
deny that I’ve drawn heavily on my own experiences in creating my protagonist,
Sarah Kellerman. I wanted to create a series of crime stories in which Sarah
faces the kinds of real-life challenges that women will relate to. Fortunately,
we’ve evolved from the days when women in crime were either helpless victims,
femme fatales or elderly sleuths and we now have a good range of clever,
capable female detectives, lawyers and private eyes – better reflecting
real-life professions involving the law. There is a notion, however, that women
– both as sleuths and as real-life professionals – should be as hard-hitting as
men in order to fight their way successfully through a male-dominated culture.
I much prefer the idea of our gender being recognised for its own massive
strengths – such as empathy, emotional intelligence, the ability to get people
to open up and talk, the ability to spot hidden dangers, to multi-task, etc. –
strengths which often go hand in hand with the practicalities of raising a
family – and that’s what I’ve tried to portray.
Do you read books while you are
writing? If so, what are they?
Yes. I always have a book on the go. On the
whole, I read the kinds of books I like to write: books about women and their
lives and relationships, domestic suspense, and legal thrillers with strong female
leads as well as a good plot. I’m also a big fan of movies and TV dramas. I’m
currently following a great Irish legal drama set in Dublin, called Striking Out. I also love The Good Wife. I’d love to see my
character, Sarah Kellerman, taking her place on the screen alongside the likes
of Tara Rafferty and Alicia Florrick, although Sarah is not quite as glamourous
as the women in those shows. But I don’t believe you have to wear a cape or an
expensive suit to be a hero…
It’s a Tuesday in mid-August
when I get the call. Ben has kept me up half the night and I’ve come to the
office with his lunchbag (pureed carrot and ricotta, Marmite soldiers, Peppa
Pig yoghurt), while he’s at nursery with mine (tuna bean salad and fizzy
water). It’s eleven thirty when the phone rings, and I’m playing the game I
play where I divide the day into manageable quarters. I’ve already made it from
breakfast to the mid-morning crime team diary meeting and, by lunchtime, I’ll
be halfway there. There will only be another two quarters of the day – I can’t
even begin to think of it as a fourteen-hour stretch; that’s way too long –
until I can crawl back under the duvet and close my eyes, even if just for a
while.
I pick up the phone. Lucy, our receptionist, says,
‘Annalise Finch for you,’ and then she’s gone.
‘Sarah! How are you?’ Annalise speaks earnestly into
the receiver, with an emphasis on the ‘you’. She waits for an answer (which not
everybody does).
‘Yeah, good. Good,’ I tell her, and then I feel the
bitter sting of tears. This is my latent, Pavlovian response to any gesture of
kindness towards me, no matter how small. Annalise is an ex-work colleague, but
I also think of her as a friend. Do I tell her that I haven’t had a decent
night’s sleep in months? That my head is throbbing and my eye sockets ache? Do
I warn her that I’m scared to open my mouth and talk, on days like today, for
fear of jumbling up my sentences or dropping nouns?
I know Annalise well enough to know that she’s not
the sort of person that judges you, and besides, she’s a woman who has had
small children, so she’s halfway to knowing what this is like. Although her
children are ordinary, regular children, of course. Her children are normal. I wonder,
fleetingly, whether I will ever be able to think about another woman’s
ordinary, regular children without feeling overwhelmed with grief and pain.
‘Sarah?’ she asks. ‘Are you still there?’
‘Sorry. Yes,’ I tell her. ‘How are you? It’s nice to
hear from you.’
It is. I had forgotten how much I liked Annalise, or
Anna as I’ve always known her at work. She’s a family lawyer. She gets called a
divorce lawyer but that’s not really what she does. She deals with child
custody, mostly, specifically public law cases, the ones where there are child
protection issues and the local authority want to take the child away. We used
to see each other at the local magistrates’ court sometimes when we both worked
at Cartwright & Taylor, and when we were both there late, as we often were,
we would stop off for a drink on the way home.
Of course, that was before Ben. I don’t get to do
things like that very much these days, but I’m happy to hear a friendly voice
on the phone, the voice of someone with whom – on a day like today, when I’m
feeling at my very most mortal – I don’t have to pretend to be the sort of
professional superwoman that I’m always reading about in the Law Society Gazette.
‘I’d love to chat,’ Anna says, ‘but, listen, I’ve got
a case for you.’ Her voice echoes a little down the receiver. I’m guessing I’m
on speakerphone. ‘It’s serious. It’s an attempted murder. Of a child.’
And then she’s off, talking rapidly, and I’m missing
what she’s said. I reach for a pen, grabbing the notebook that’s on the desk in
front of me and finding a fresh page. As I do so I nudge my coffee cup and a
stream of light brown liquid leaps over the rim and across the desk. I’m
instantly overwhelmed with the urge to either punch somebody or throw myself
out of the window, the small puddle of coffee in front of me magnified by lack
of sleep into Atlantic proportions. Instead I tuck the phone under my chin,
pull a pack of baby wipes out of my handbag, take out a handful and drop them,
one by one, onto the desk.
‘You’re really the best person I can think of for
this,’ Anna is saying.
‘I’m really sorry, Anna,’ I interrupt her. ‘I didn’t
catch all of that. Would you mind starting again?’
‘Oh. No. Of course not.’ She picks up the phone, and
her voice comes into focus. ‘It’s one of my clients. She’s accused of trying to
kill her eleven-month-old baby. Her name’s Ellie. She’s a young mum – twenty
years old. Cut a long story short, she’s poisoned him. Then, while he’s in
hospital recovering, she’s gone onto the ward and tried to kill him again.’
‘Jesus. How?’
‘He was on dialysis after his kidneys failed. She
pulled out the tube – the line, they call it – that took the blood out of his
body and into the machine, and of course the machine just kept pumping the
blood out of him. She covered him with a blanket to hide it. He nearly bled to
death.’
‘Jesus,’ I say again. ‘What’s the evidence that it
was her?’
‘Well, no one saw it happen. But she was there when
they found him. She was asleep on a camp bed beside him – or pretending to be;
that’s what the police are saying. A nurse spotted a pool of blood under the
cot. He’d lost around a quarter of it, gone into heart failure. They managed to
resuscitate him, but he’s still in a critical condition.’
‘Which hospital is it?’
‘Southwark St Martin’s.’
I feel a sharp jolt of pain. St Martin’s. The same
hospital. I throw the bundle of soggy wipes into the bin under my desk and sit
back in my chair. I can see the ward; I can feel the heat of it, smell the
antiseptic air. I can see the cot and the blanket – white, crocheted with a
blue and white Southwark St Martin’s trim. I can see the baby, pale and still.
I can picture it all, as if I’m there.
‘Also, he was with her when he was poisoned,’ adds
Anna.
I pull a fresh notepad from my drawer. ‘How was he
poisoned?’
‘Salt.’
‘Salt?’
‘Yep. It causes a potentially fatal electrolyte
imbalance. It’s called hypernatraemia.’
I think about this for a moment. I think about Ben.
‘How do you force salt into a one-year-old?’
‘I don’t know. But somebody did. And he was with her.
Ellie. She’d had him overnight, unsupervised, for the first time in months. He
was in care at the time. He’d already been taken away from her.’
‘Why?’
‘They found injuries. Bruises – and burns – when he
was around eight months old. That’s how I got her case. Although we managed to
fight it that time. Our expert report was favourable; it said that no one could
be certain that the injuries were non-accidental. She was well on the way to
getting him back again, but then he’s admitted to hospital with what they think
is a virus, which turns out to be sodium poisoning.’
‘And they left her alone with him, in hospital?’
‘They knew he was seriously ill, but they didn’t know
he’d been poisoned at that stage, not until the tests came back.’
Anna pauses. My pen hovers above the page while I
take this in.
‘I’ve got to admit, it doesn’t look great for her,’
Anna says. ‘The prosecution case is that the three separate incidences of harm
combine to build an overall picture of deliberate abuse. They each support each
other. It all kind of stacks up. And Ellie… well, unfortunately, she doesn’t
come across well.’
‘Why? What does she say?’
‘Oh, she denies it – all of it. Says she’d never hurt
her baby. But she wasn’t great in interview. She can’t explain how it happened,
any of it, other than to say it wasn’t her. She doesn’t... well, volunteer
information. She just gets angry and then clams up. I know she’s scared. She’s
a “looked after” kid herself – she grew up in a care home in Stockwell – and
she’s like many of our young people: naturally reticent and suspicious of the
authorities. She has no faith that anyone is going to believe her side of
things. But it comes across the wrong way. She appears… overly defensive. And
secretive, as if she’s hiding something.’
‘What’s her previous?’
‘Thefts, cars and stuff as a youth. Peer pressure
probably. Nothing like this, and nothing for a while.’
‘So, when’s the first hearing?’ I look up as the door
opens and Matt, my colleague, walks in. He takes off his coat and sits down at
the desk next to me. I flash him a smile. He purses his lips and switches on
his computer.
‘That’s the thing,’ Anna says. ‘It’s been and gone.
The case has been sent to Inner London Crown Court. She’s been remanded to
Bronzefield. There’s a bail hearing tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?!’
‘I’m sorry, I know it’s short notice. But I was on
holiday when they arrested and charged her. We went to Sri Lanka, Tim and I and
the girls, for a fortnight. I didn’t find out until I got back into the office
this morning.’
‘Sri Lanka. Wow. Sounds wonderful.’ I can’t help
feeling a stab of envy; I can’t take those sorts of holidays any more.
‘Look, are you OK with this?’ Anna asks me. ‘I mean,
I did think about it, that it might drag stuff up for you. But that’s why I
also think you’d be the best person to take this on. You spent a lot of time in
hospitals when Ben was small. You know what it’s like to have a sick child.’
‘Yes, I… it’s fine. Really,’ I say. ‘I want to do it.’
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