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Without Consent is one of the Frances Fyfield Helen West novels, with the CPS prosecutor working a serial-rapist case where the institutional reluctance to bring charges is the case's real obstacle. Helen's personal relationships (her on-again, off-again with the police detective Bailey, her difficult mother) carry through the book in series-realistic ways.
Fyfield's strength is the moral pressure on her professional protagonist. The book is not a thriller and is not interested in being one. It is a quiet documentation of a particular kind of legal work and what it costs the people who do it.
Four stars. Recommended to readers of British legal procedural with serious moral interest. The Helen West sequence is one of the underread peaks of the late-80s and 90s form.
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