Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Who says? Distinguished biographer Beatrice Bowman is being sued for libel by a new member of the House of Lords for implicating him in a thirty-year-old terrorist outrage. At the other end of the legal spectrum, a family of South London villains gags and suffocates those who try to expose their secrets. And Inspector Caro Lyalt has to decide what to do with information from a whistle-blower that could ruin a colleague's career - or her own. Caught in the middle of it all is barrister Trish Maguire. Picking her way through the maze of lies and threats, she brings danger terrifyingly close to herself and the people she loves. In Gagged and Bound Natasha Cooper explores the full destructive power of the wrong words spoken at the wrong time. Described as 'ahead of most current detective fiction', her books just get better and better.