Read in 2025 - 24: Life Sentence

Life Sentence

A. K. Turner

Another paperback I found at the second-hand book sale at the church in town centre and took home for 2 €, it went on holiday with me and provided really good reading during some rainy afternoons and evenings at the hotel, before and after dinner.

It is the second book in a series about Cassie Raven, a young woman who works as a mortuary technician and takes her job seriously to the point of conducting her own under-the-radar investigation when she doubts the verdict on someone's cause of death.

Not having read the 1st book doesn't really matter; there are occasional references to it, but the story and characters can be understood very well without it.

In this book, the main case is not related to one of her "guests" (that's what Cassie calls the dead people she has to prepare for identification or viewing by their loved ones as well as for autopsies and funerals) at the mortuary, but about her own family.

She lost both her parents in a car accident when she was only four years old, and was raised by her maternal grandmother. Recently, her grandmother has suffered a stroke, and while it wasn't life threatening, it has left the elderly woman with the wish to come clear about what really happened when Cassie was four: Her father murdered her mother.

Now, 17 years later, he is out of prison and makes contact, claiming that he didn't do it.

Cassie is torn between wanting to believe him - it wouldn't change the fact that her Mum was murdered, but it would bring her Dad back, whom she remembers as loving, gentle and funny - and doubting his story. After all, her grandmother tells her that she suspected domestic violence and alcoholism in her daughter's marriage, and that she wasn't surprised when her son-in-law was convicted of the murder.

Nobody seems to be interested or willing to pick up the old case, and so Cassie sets out on her own to find the truth, ruffling more than one set of feathers along the way. 

At the same time, she handles several cases at work, finding clues to a different cause of death than what was first assumed, which in turn creates problems with her boss who is annoyed at her acting "above her station".

I really liked this book. Some detail can seem a bit gory, but nothing is unnecessarily drawn out, and it all serves the story's purpose. The overall impression of Cassie and her work is her very respectful dealing with each dead person and their loved ones, and I like the way she does not treat death as a taboo - it is all around us, after all, and shutting ourselves completely off it doesn't change that, it only makes it harder to accept this fact of life.

According to the book's first page, the author works also as a TV producer and writer of documentaries, and her character Cassie Raven was first introduced in two short stories on BBC Radio 4. Her website with more about her and her books is here.