‘The Trial’ by Jo Spain

Published by Quercus,
25 April 2024.
ISBN: 978-1-52943-980-9 (HB)

Some crime novels are pure entertainment, if matters of life and death can be described in that way. Others make use of the life and death to explore other issues as well, and that’s what Jo Spain’s latest standalone sets out to do. 

From the title, you could be forgiven for expecting a legal thriller, and the opening chapter does nothing to contradict that. A young man, Theo, leaves his girlfriend Dani asleep in her college room in the small hours of the morning, and heads out on a mission which is clearly of the utmost importance to him.

Fast forward nine years, and there’s the first suggestion that the trial in question is actually a different kind. A patient dies on a geriatric ward, and an observant nurse notices something on his records. She reports it, and a month later her body is retrieved from a canal after a car accident.

A year later still, Dani, the girlfriend in the first chapter, has returned to the college as a lecturer – and it soon becomes plain that she is not quite as she seems. Two mysteries start to unfold. Theo hasn’t been seen since his disappearance ten years earlier, and it seems only Dani is concerned; and the nurse’s ‘accidental’ death might be anything but. And the trial of the title is a long way from the legal kind.

Given Jo Spain’s previous life in politics and journalism, it’s unsurprising that what follows sounds pretty convincing as it delves into murky ethical territory. She does it through the medium of scratch-me-and-I-bleed characters, some unequivocally on the angels’ or devil’s side, some who leave the reader unsure what to believe about them. The locations, too, spring off the page: the venerable older college buildings, the shiny new science block, an upmarket bar, a village in France Dani visits, all come to life. 

Spain explores the kind of topic which makes the news and does it with a sure hand on the tiller and a keen eye for what can go wrong. Alzheimer’s, the pharmaceutical industry, funding for education, care for the elderly all come under scrutiny, with the twin mysteries of Theo and the nurse woven into a complex fabric.

Some mystery novels, the best kind in my opinion, raise important questions, examine important issues, and make us wonder exactly what does go on behind closed doors. This is one – and as it does all those things, it succeeds in being a meaty page-turner.
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Jo Spain is vice-chair of business body InterTrade Ireland and a parliamentary assistant in Leinster House. Her first novel With our Blessing was published by Quercus, London and was one of seven books shortlisted in the Richard and Judy search for a bestseller competition 2014. The book is based on the investigations of a Dublin-based detective team led by Tom Reynolds. It was launched in Ireland in September 2015 and became a top-ten bestseller that month. The rights have been snapped up in Germany. Since the she has published ten further books. Jo lives in Dublin with her husband and their four young children.  

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.