Career

BOOK REVIEW: The Good Life

Book editor Kerre McIvor reviews Martina Cole’s latest thriller.
The-Good-Life book review

Martina Cole might never win a literary award, but that doesn’t bother her. She is far and away the most successful author in Britain and her books regularly top the best-selling lists.

The crime writer says she inherited the gift of storytelling from her Irish Catholic father and wrote her first “novel” at the age of 14.

At the age of 30, she decided to give writing a proper go and sent a manuscript to an agent she’d picked at random from an agents’ directory. Almost overnight (four days after the agent read the novel, to be exact), life changed for the solo mother who’d been born in the roughest part of Essex.

The success of her writing has made Martina a multimillionaire but she has stayed true to her roots. Oh, sure, there are the flash cars and beautiful homes, but the most important people in her life are her family and friends, and she is fiercely loyal to those who first believed in her. The author has stayed with the same publishing house and agent since her first manuscript was accepted, despite being tempted with lucrative offers to change.

For those of you who have read Martina Cole, you’ll know that these are the very qualities the characters in her novels represent. The men might be vicious killers who are capable of rape and torture, but they have soft sides as well and family is everything. The women are the same – tarts with hearts who can see the beauty in the beast of the gangster.

The Good Life is more of the same from Martina – handsome hard man Cain falls for beautiful Jenny and leaves his wife and son for her. This sets off a chain of events that results in pain, loss and heartache.

The language is coarse and the violence is dark, but if you can cope with that, you’ll be rewarded with a read that is difficult to put down.

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