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To hell with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens – these are a few of MY favourite things –
Manchester. The present day. The central character is DI Thomas Ridpath, and member of the Major Incident Team (MIT), who doubles as Coroner’s Officer. He is a widower with a teenage daughter about to face her GCSEs. We learn right from the start that a serial killer is at large. He specialises in a warped version of Assisted Dying, and injects his elderly victims with fatal doses of pain relieving drugs. We know this. The police have no idea. Central to the narrative is Margaret Challinor, the Coroner. She has returned to work after being debilitated by a savage random assault, which resulted in her being in a coma for many weeks. She has recovered. But has she? Thundering headaches suggest that all is not well, but she is a formidable woman, and battles on through the pain.
MJ Lee clearly has experience of being the subject of word-salad management speak. Here, a new commander (recently promoted from Traffic) gives the team an inspirational address:
“The Chief has asked me to bring managerial systems and competence to the organisation of the solution of crimes, to be data-driven in this age of AI, computers and complex analytics, an approach that builds on our core competences and resilience, but takes advantage of the sizeable opportunities afforded by this new technology and analytics to create a force that is forward-thinking, creative rather than reactive, one that uses its resources to the limits of their capabilities to serve the people of Manchester, ensuring they feel secure and protected as they go about their daily lives.”
Ridpath is resolute, persistent, and no-one”s fool. Those three qualities make him a thorn in the side of his pusillanimous senior managers who are bitterly resentful that a spreadsheet macro cannot bring to justice the person who is taking such obvious delight in ending the lives of Ill and vulnerable old people. Ridpath’s dogged attention to detail closes the case, but not before his own life is put on the line.
Apart from his scathing caricature of Ridpath’s boss and his oleagenous lanyard – class pomposity, MJ Lee doesn’t preach or wave any particular banner. The story – an excellent police procedural – did make me wonder about the overly politicised leadership of our police forces. I am not a Londoner, but the replacement of the ineffectual Cressida Dick with the operational paralysis induced by Mark Rowlands is a case in point. It you can hear my sigh of impotent despair, then it will be momentary. This particular rant is for another day. What The Dying See is published by Canelo and is out now.
This, for me, is the definitive account of the life and work of the great novelist and poet. It was published in 2006. More recent books have explored the complex relationship Hardy had with his two wives, and his various infatuations, but Claire Tomalin was the first to put forward the simple – but sadly accurate – premise that Thomas Hardy was more in love with his great fictional creations than he ever was with flesh and blood women. Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbyfield, Eustacia Vye and Marty South were closer to his soul than either of his two wives.
Hardy, as a writer, was a great one for irony and tragic coincidences. There is the poem where a young parishioner is entranced by the stirring rhetoric of the handsome vicar’s sermon. When she goes to the vestry door to pay her respects, she sees him rehearsing his gestures in the wardrobe mirror.
“And now to God the Father”, he ends, And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles: Each listener chokes as he bows and bends, And emotion pervades the crowded aisles. Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door, And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more.
The door swings softly ajar meanwhile. And a pupil of his in the Bible class, Who adores him as one without gloss or guile, Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile And re-enact at the vestry-glass Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show That had moved the congregation so.“
Observing two families bickering over the exact location of the graves of their respective loved ones, two saturnine grave diggers chuckle over the fact that all the remains had been dumped in a communal pit to make way for a new sewage system.
“You see those mothers squabbling there?” Remarks the man of the cemetery. “One says in tears, “Tis mine lies here!’ Another, ‘Nay, mine, you Pharisee!’ Another, ‘How dare you move my flowers And put your own on this grave of ours!’ But all their children were laid therein At different times, like sprats in a tin.”
And then the main drain had to cross, And we moved the lot some nights ago, And packed them away in the general foss With hundreds more. But their folks don’t know, And as well cry over a new-laid drain As anything else, to ease your pain!”
Hardy’s courtship of and love for Emma Lavinia Gifford was genuine and heartfelt. She defied parental disapproval to marry him, and for several years, their marriage seemed to work. The steady erosion in their relationship had complex causes, but central to the decline was their inability to have children. Over the decades Emma, who had literary pretensions of her own, became more eccentric. As Hardy’s celebrity grew, she became to feel more on the fringes of his life. By the time of her death in 1912, they were living two separate lives under the same roof.
Well before Emma Hardy died, Hardy had transferred his affections to a young woman called Florence Dugdale who had become, depending on whose account you believe, his secretary, typist, amanuensis or spiritual companion. After Emma died, effectively alone in her attic bedroom, Hardy married Florence, but almost immediately began to write a series of heart wrenching poems of regret for the Emma he had known and loved as a younger man. For all that she may be perceived as an opportunist, the effect of this on Florence was one of cruelty, albeit unintended. The final macabre ironic twist came after Hardy’s death in 11th January 1928. In his will he had asked that his body be buried in Stinsford churchyard, where his family lay. His literary executors, probably mindful of the continuing royalties from his works, persuaded Florence to agree to a high profile interment in Westminster Abbey. The Abbey authorities declared they had no room for a full sized coffin, but could accommodate an urn of cremated ashes. In a bizarre compromise that sounds like one of his Satires of Circumstances, a local doctor removed Hardy’s heart before the rest of him was taken to the crematorium in Weymouth. Allegedly, it was put in a biscuit tin and taken to a local undertaker.
There used to be a piece of conventional wisdom that Hardy gave up writing novels after the critical reception of Jude the Obscure. This, as Claire Tomalin explains, is nonsense. Hardy’s most celebrated novels were best sellers, even Jude, despite the shocks it caused in the late Victorian world. The success of these books had made Hardy a very wealthy man. Why would he bother to further endure the lengthy process of writing tens of thousands of words, having it serialised, abridged and then issued as a complete book, when his poems were equally well received and, in collections, remained hugely popular? The concept of a poet being both popular and financially successful is largely absent from the modern literary world.
The book’s subtitle, The Time Torn Man is acutely perceptive. Every word Hardy wrote, every situation he described, every emotion he recalled – each is embedded firmly in his emotional past. The charming rustics he described in his novels, jocular, well-fed and comfortable had, by the time his first novels were published, been driven from the land to the larger towns to escape rural poverty. The waves of love he wrote about, on watching Emma ride her pony along the Cornish cliff tops were simply memories enhanced with regret and an awareness of what might have been. When he writes about a worm-eaten old violin, hanging on a cottage wall, he hears the jigs and reels that it once played, while the cottagers formed their exuberant squares and circles. Claire Tomalin has written a deeply moving and compassionate account of one of our greatest writers.
The last words of this wonderful book are: “He wrote honest poems, almost every one shaped and structured with its own thought and its own music. They remind us that he was a fiddler’s son,with music in his blood and bone, who danced to his father’s playing before he learned to write. This is how I like to think of him, a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious, ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.“
Jane Thynne’s novel spans many decades, and takes us from London, Paris and Berlin to New York. The central characters are sisters Cordelia and Irene Capel. Born into an aristocratic English world, the sisters take very different paths when Irene marries the heir to a German industrial empire and moves to Berlin. Cordelia, meanwhile, hoping for a career as a writer, takes a job as a secretary at the Paris office of a London newspaper.
Irene discovers – at first with amusement and then, as the true nature of the party is revealed to her, dismay – that her husband Ernst is an admirer of the Nazi party – and the feeling is mutual. At social functions she rubs shoulders with, among others, Herman Goering and Reinhardt Heydrich. She also meets Martha Dodd, the captivating daughter of the American Ambassador. Dodd went on to have a career as a novelist and Soviet spy, but shortly before her father is recalled to America, she tells Irene what Berlin is really like:
“I had a lover once who was chief of police and he put the fear of the devil into me. He said Berlin was a vast network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate from which no one could escape.”
Along the way, we meet other real life characters such as Hardy Amies, Adolph Eichmann, Arthur Koestler and Kim Philby. Jane Thynne’s account of the paradox of late 1930s Germany is familiar, but still painful to read. On the one hand there was the booming economy, miniscule employment, and a burgeoning sense of national identity. On the other hand, the relentless surveillance by the Gestapo and the descent into state sponsored thuggery should haunt everyone, including modern Germans and its neighbours who sat back and watched it happen.
The narrative is cleverly constructed, and its master stroke is the introduction of modern day photographer Juno Lambert who buys an old portable typewriter for a photo shoot and uncovers a mystery that is as enchanting as it is chilling. Jane Thynne poses an exquisitely painful moral question, which is centred around the life of Irene. We see her as a newly-wed in the heady days of pre-war Berlin, with a glittering social life on the arm of her husband, Ernst. Their villa on the shores of the Wannsee, is a paradise, with a fertile garden rich with fruit and delicious vegetables. Literally ‘the house next door’ was where Reinhardt Heydrich chaired the infamous conference which drove the final nail into the coffin of Europe’s Jews.
We see Irene in the early months of 1945. The house is undamaged, but Ernst is long dead, killed on the Eastern Front. She boils the remains of vegetables to make an apology for soup. She trades her Cartier watch for a rabbit at the butcher shop. Everywhere, the talk is ‘what will happen when the Ivan’s arrive?’ The women of Berlin know only too well.
The moral question is this. Do we sympathise with people like Irene, betrayed by a corrupt and vainglorious government, or do we opt for that word (that only the Germans could invent) Schadenfreude? Although, wordwise, most of the novel is full of the stories of Irene and Cordelia, Juno Lambert is the key which unlocks the past. Juno rents the Villa Weissmuller in 2016 and, having read Cordelia’s manuscript, hidden in the case of the antique typewriter, she is anxious to find out if the sisters were ever reconciled.
There is an exquisite moment of irony when, with the Red Army rampaging through Berlin, we read how Irene’s recent lover, Obersturmbannführer Alex Hoffman, and the young Jewish man she has been sheltering for weeks, cower together in the hastily constructed hiding place behind the ornate shelves of the house’s library. This magnificent novel is many things: a record of atrocities almost too awful to contemplate, let alone describe in words; several stories of love, some of which end in tragedy; a hymn of praise for Berlin, a city which has suffered unspeakable cruelty, but a place resilient enough to reinvent itself; finally, it is an encomium for the human spirit and an echo of Larkin’s words, “What will survive of us is love.”The Words I Never Wrote is published by Sharpe Books and is available now.
A new Jo Spain novel is always to be welcomed. I still believe that her Tom Reynolds police procedurals (link to reviews here) were the best of that genre I have ever read. Now, however, she is making a name for herself (and, I imagine, much more money) as a screenwriter and, indeed, this new book has already gone into development as a major network TV series.
The premise of Never To Be Found is both original and very clever. Veronica Page has a skill-set which was highly valued in Japan, the art of johatsu – the ability to make people disappear. People who have buckled under pressure, people with futures they are unwilling to contemplate, people who are burdened with some sense of shame or failure. Page isn’t a killer. Quite the reverse. She sees herself as a restorer of lives. She erases the old identity, and gives her customers the chance to reinvent themselves somewhere else, as someone altogether different. Now, she has an English client. A young man called Ben. He is due to inherit a huge fortune somewhere down the line, but now is trapped in the relationship between his feckless alcoholic mother and a bullying stepfather. Ben, however, isn’t the problem.
A man called Mark Drake most definitely is. Fifteen months earlier Veronica helped him disappear and, according to chapter three, he killed his wife. I use the words ‘according to’ advisedly. Problem is, with Jo Spain plots, you never quite know if she is telling you the full story. She has this sublime skill of encouraging the reader to make assumptions, which can lead to all manner of surprises. Anyway, it seems that Mark Drake has fled a murder scene, leaving behind two bodies. One is that of his wife, Amy. But there is another, and there, as WS once said “lies the rub”.
Veronica is approached by suspended police office named Seb who is determined to find Mark Drake and, by a mixture of persuasion and coercion, Veronica agrees to help him. She and Seb get a clue, and head to York, which was where Drake was headed. We know that Mark is in town, because he gets a couple of brief chapters to himself. It is at this point that seasoned Jo Spain readers may begin to suspect that there is s definitely something she is not telling us, at least explicitly. Veronica is nearly run down by a motorcyclist, and then she learns that one of the experts in her chain of identity changers, the man who produces fake IDs, had been found dead. And the police are very keen to speak to her.
Almost exactly half way through the book we learn more about Veronica’s backstory. Her father worked in the restaurant industry, and his main job was sourcing seafood – and in particular, tuna – from Japan. This meant frequent absences from home, but there was one final trip from which he never returned. The 18 year-old Veronica and her mentally fragile mother travel to Japan to find him. They are faced with the chilling truth that Veronica’s father’s rented Lexus was pulled from the water of the Seto Inland Sea. His wallet was there. His passport was there. His phone was there. But he wasn’t. Local contacts suggest that he may have wanted to disappear, and this is Veronica’s introduction to johatsu. I mentioned WS earlier, but what happens in the later part of the book reminds me of Macbeth, rather than Hamlet. In the Scottish Play, there is a recurring theme of reversal, paradox, of black becoming white, of good becoming evil: the celebrated quote is:
“Fair is foul and foul is fair, Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
This book has more tricks up its sleeve than Tommy Cooper, but unlike Tommy, Jo Spain delivers them faultlessly. The narrative is taut and the dialogue is convincing. Compared to the Tom Reynolds novels I mentioned earlier, this story has TV mini-series stamped all over it, and is clearly designed for international consumption. It is none the worse for that, however, and I can heartily recommend it. It will be published by Zaffre on 2nd July.
The Brigid Reardon Mysteries by Mary Logue are historical mysteries centered on an Irish immigrant navigating the American West in the 1880s. Starting with The Streel (2020) and followed by The Big Sugar (2023), the series features a determined, independent protagonist who solves murders in places like Deadwood and Cheyenne while seeking a better life. This is the third in the series, and begins in Salt Lake City where the eighteen year-old Brigid is applying for a job in a bookstore owned by a Mr Cutter.
We know from a brief preface that this gentleman has five wives, but this is, after all, Mormon central. Mr Cutter is something of a nasty piece of work. Not content with his five wives, he has his eyes on a sixth, Amelia. Normal terms for relatives become a problem in pluralistic marriages, but I think Amelia is his step daughter, as she is the daughter (by a previous marriage) of his second wife, Sarah. Unfortunately for Cutter’s equilibrium, sixteen year-old Amelia has fallen in love with Brandon, Cutter’s son by his first wife, Eliza.
When Mr Cutter is found dead in the sewing room of their house – a room he never has reason to visit – Brigid is reacquainted with Dr Kohler, a man she met in the bookstore. Doctor K has little to do with live patients – he is the city coroner. Cutter’s demise ushers in a delightful (for us readers) whodunnit, as a longish list of suspects is instantly available. Was it one of the wives, driven by jealousy? Brandon – or even Amelia – angered by his refusal to countenance their affection for each other? Or is it someone outside the family with a grudge against Cutter due to some slight or grievance borne out of the complex local religious politics? Whoever, the relationship between Kohler and Brigid is a CriFi match made in heaven.
At 200 pages, this is more of a novella, but none the worse for that. Spoiler alert – we are introduced to the murder weapon early in the piece, but as to who wielded it, that is rather more nuanced. There is one trivial, but unfortunate, research error. Dr Kohler refers to the methods of Sherlock Holmes. This is 1881, and it would be another six years before the character would appear, in A Study In Scarlet.
Written in the first person, the narrative of A Wasp In The Beehive ensures that we know plenty about Brigid. She is a bright, resourceful and courageous heroine. Categories are subjective, I suppose, but they are useful for tags, so I class this as Cosy Crime. Not my chosen genre, for sure, but I enjoyed this tale. It is published by The University of Minnesota Press and is available now.
I’ll be upfront and say that I loved this book from the very first page. There were two initial reasons, the first being that it is set in my favourite county of Shropshire, a place where I spent happy years, and somewhere that remains a repository of golden memories. Secondly, joy of joys, it has a simple and uncluttered chronological narrative, with none of the contrived ‘two years earlier’ or ‘six months later’ chapter headings so much in vogue with some authors. Priscilla Masters sets Shrewsbury coroner Martha Gunn and DI Alex Randall a grim problem to solve. Two teenage joyriders have died when their stolen car dives headlong off the edge of a steep disused quarry. As the police are cleaning up the scene, they pop the boot, and find the emaciated corpse of an elderly woman. And a third boy, who may well have been in the car, is nowhere to be found. Martha Gunn and Alex Randall are complex but attractive characters. Gunn was widowed some years earlier, and brought up her twins Sam and Sukey while balancing the demands of her job. After a career in sport that didn’t quite work out, Sam is now at university, while Sukey is well-known actress in a popular TV soap. Randall’s back story has an element of tragedy, too. His wife, Erica, died after falling downstairs. She was an unstable woman, and their marriage was unhappy. For a while, the circumstances of her death were considered suspicious, but Randall was cleared of any culpability. The couple had a child, but Christopher died shortly after birth, of a genetic defect.
The missing teenage joy rider is eventually found, and he confesses that they had been taking the car – which belonged to their deceased tutor at a local college – out for illicit drives for some time, but it wasn’t until they opened the boot to find a foot pump that they discovered the body. Panicking, and convinced they would be blamed for her death, they decided to dump it at Clive Quarry, but it went disastrously wrong. The surviving boy, Sol Raintree, managed to jump out of the back seat before it plummeted down the badly eroded cliff side. The body of the elderly woman, tagged with generic name Jane Doe, poses seemingly unanswerable questions. Why was she kept in a cold place – but not frozen – before she was put in the boot of the car? Who had dyed her hair, and painted her nails, and made a loving professional job of both? Why does her broken femur, an accident which occurred not long before she died, not show up on any contemporary medical records?
I am not normally a huge fan of romantic entanglements between investigating officers in crime novels, but Priscilla Masters handles the growing relationship between Gunn and Randall with the lightest of touches. As I hinted earlier, I loved the Shropshire setting, and many of the topographical references chimed with me, in particular the powerful presence of The Severn, deceptively beautiful but also a powerful bringer of destruction when in flood. There is also the occasional hint of the ‘blue remembered hills’, and it was pleasant to be reminded of places like Baschurch and Church Stretton.
The author keeps us waiting for some time before she delivers a beautifully complex but elegantly credible solution to a puzzling death. Jane Doe finally gets a real name, the dignity of a funeral, and a mourner. The Cliff’s Edge Murders will be published by Joffe Books on 25th June.
Bruno Courrèges is the Chief of Police of the Vézère Valley in the Périgord region of France. It is springtime in the little market town of St Denis. The genial Bruno does have a past, and it is somewhat darker than the constant sunlight if St Denis. He was raised in an orphanage and, as a young soldier, experienced the mind numbing brutality of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. When his friend Pamela, who runs a riding stables, returns to her house and finds her lodger, Josette Quirit, battered to death on the patio, he is informed, but is forced to recuse himself from the investigation due to his friendship with Pamela. Instead, an old friend Jean-Jacques Jalipeau from Périgeux attends, along with his colleague Fabien Panton. There are two subplots. The gentler of the two is Bruno’s concern for the declining fortunes of St Denis in commercial terms. The weekly market is shrinking: stallholders are relocating to a nearby town, and shops are losing footfall. I realise that a picturesque Dordogne town is very different from where I live – a hard-scrabble town in one of England’s more deprived areas, but at least St Denis seems to have escaped the dubious pleasures of fake barber shops, nail bars, money laundering ventures posing as vape stores, and a proliferation of bookmakers. Bruno hatches a rejuvenation plan. As to the second, we have a mysterious prelude, apparently unrelated to St Denis or the murdered woman. I am not keen on this literary device, and I think it is over-used, but that’s just a personal grouch. In an unidentified school, a young boy is made to stand for ages, holding heavy books on his outstretched arms. Then he falls, cracks his head, and all hell breaks loose. We come to believe that this is the same Catholic boarding school that Fabien Panton was sent by his parents. The mysterious prelude makes sudden – and rather grim – sense, when it is revealed that the school matron who inflicted the fatal punishment on the schoolboy was Joséphine Tauton, convicted of manslaughter. On her release from prison she became Josette Quirit. Bruno and Fabien have another lead. Vehicles captured on CCTV in the vicinity of the murder site are connected to a Netflix crew filming a historical drama series in the area.In the end, it is a curious blend of of technical data – the readings from a FitBit watch – and Bruno’s very human intuition that brings the killer to justice, and the novel ends on a festive note, if not for the victim and her killer, but for the market stallholders of St Denis. This is, of course, cosy crime, but of a superior nature. Bruno is a confirmed gastronome, and the book is full of descriptions of meal preparation, rural charcuterie delicacies and, of course, delicious local wines. Bruno”s world is, of course pure fantasy, albeit of a delightful kind. Despite its perceived decline, St Denis has a proper boulangerie and a shop where a Belgian chocolatier creates his own irresistible treats. There is, of course a high class butcher, from whom Bruno thinks nothing of ordering a 35 kilo lamb in order to treat his friends to an Easter méchoui. Even the rather reduced market has stalls selling proper farm-made cheeses, and the hills around the town are still peopled by small vineyards, each producing delicious – and affordable – wines. This is heady stuff, especially for British readers in provincial towns where genuine locally produced food is either hideously expensive, or completely unavailable. Martin Walker writes of what he knows, as in 2013, he was made a chevalier of foie gras, in the confrérie of paté de Périgueux, and also an honorary Ambassador of the Périgord, which means he gets to accompany the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave as it goes on display at museums around the world. He also helps promote the wines of Bergerac at international wine fairs, and was chairman of the jury for this year’s Prix Ragueneau, the international culinary prize. A Murder in Springtime is as light as one of Bruno’s superior souffles, but very entertaining. It will be published by Quercus on 18th June.
In the unlikely event of anyone reading this being unaware of Rob Rinder, please stay tuned. Rinder is a Mancunian barrister who made his name as TV presenter of popular TV shows based on trials and other legal matters. He turned his hand to writing, and I normally shun crime novels written by TV celebrities, on the grounds that when these books top the book sales charts, it will invariably be because of the fame of the author, rather than the quality of the writing. That said, Rinder’s The Defence is very readable. A (perhaps autobiographical) barrister, Adam Green, a Jewish lad from Manchester (with no known girlfriends) is engaged to help defend Juliet Quentin, personal assistant to a wellness-guru, Adrian Wells, who died while publicly demonstrating his latest herbal panacaea. He died because his miraculous bath elixir contained fatal doses of monkshood, an ancient and deadly poison.
Juliet Quentin has ‘a past’, most significantly being her involvement in a prime time reality TV show, where she was cast as a despicable and malevolent villain, responsible for evicting some of the viewers’ favourites from the TV set. As a potential witness, she is every defence barrister’s nightmare. She is dowdy, sarcastic and surly, and seems to have every available motive for killing Adrian Wells, who was an a manipulative and opportunist chancer. While he was still an MP, he spearheaded legislation aimed at the big pharma companies who were making millions out of anti-cancer drugs. He persuaded several of his stricken constituents to abandon the NHS drugs in favour of herbal remedies which he was developing. The premature deaths of these people gives Adam a bewildering choice of people who might have had reason to kill Wells.
It would be easy to dismiss this novel as just another potboiler by a media celebrity, a book aimed at the book racks in ASDA and TESCO. It is probably guilty on both those charges, but it is better than that. It covers many complex issues. Adam Green is likeable, but he is naive and easily taken in, and his ambivalence at having to stand up in court and be clever in defending unpleasant criminals weighs heavily on him. It seemed to me that Adam is unsure about his own sexuality, but his social and professional circumstances prevent him from addressing the issue. Rinder provides us with a few memorable characters, including the flamboyant and abrasive KC Ursula Elder, and the fractious father and son duo, one of whom is woker than woke, while the other is strict huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’.
Courtroom dramas are not normally my thing, but Rob Rinder, with his vast experience, keeps the tension bubbling. At times he is a bit preachy when talking about LGBTQ issues, but this was a minor irritation. I could also have done without. Adam Green’s cartoon Jewish mother (does anyone have Maureen Lipmann on speed dial?) but The Defence is an entertaining and immersive addition to the CriFi genre. It will be published by Century on 18th June.
We are in New England, and it is the present day. Carla James, an academic and archaeologist, is about to begin a week’s summer school at an annexe of Jericho College (American for university), an establishment for well-to-do youngsters from connected families. The first few pages of the book, however, take us back to 1870; same place, but we observe a small but significant domestic tragedy involving a woman called Meg Woodthorpe. For Carla, well known locally for using her archaeological skill to help in criminal cases, the mysteries are not long in arriving. One attendee, a mature student called Melissa, had not arrived. Then, Carla is called in by the local pathologist (an old friend) to examine the body of a woman whose face had been hacked into shreds by a metal weapon. That weapon seems to be a geological hand pick, found near the corpse. On the wooden handle is stamped ‘Anthropology Department Jericho College’.
Finally, what is the significance of the antique framed embroidered picture in Carla’s room, which shows a hare in full flight, above the stark warning, ‘Beware’? The significance of the brief prologue is soon explained, as some of the course members have picked up on a local rhyme: “Poor little Meg, who wouldn’t stay dead, They buried her under a tree. She threw off her stone and chewed on a bone Until her spirit was free” Bear in mind that the course Carla is running is a commercial venture, and open to all. The participants are a mixed bunch. There is Trudy Cai, a property lawyer from Chicago; Annie Lockley, an administrator at Jericho, and Belle, an older woman with iron grey hair. The missing Melissa is a care home worker who feels she missed out on a college education. Riley runs a bar somewhere, and his luggage includes cases of beer and wine. Shawn and Lauren are a younger ‘pair’, but Shawn is possessive and edgy. Another older man is Scott, “a tall laconic man with a ponytail, who gave off an ageing hippy vibe.” Jack Caron is another academic, who is co-tutor on the course, and has chosen to live off-site in an attempt to breathe life into a troubled marriage. The missing Melissa is found, but in a place that neither she, Jericho College nor her nearest and dearest would have chosen. The plot is deliciously twisted, and takes us through the highways and byways of New England history, legends of witchcraft and the truly complex folklore surrounding Lepus Europeanis – the hare. This delightful animal is almost certainly entirely innocent of supernatural qualities but, over the centuries, country people have ascribed to it all manner of wizardry, ranging from a harbinger of fertility, being a feminist symbol and a creature in touch with the world of The Dead. Eventually, the body of the woman whose face was so brutally obliterated is Identified as that of Jacky Ek, a local woman well connected to the College and also to the Lepus Society. Clare also learns that the field where her body was found is known locally as the Strevens Land. Catherine Strevens was a near contemporary of the unfortunate Meg Woodthorpe, and there is a strict deed of covenant attached to land, which states that it can never be built on. Carla James is a convincing central character, even if she too often emulated the scantily clad young women much used in Hammer films, who ill-advisedly ventures in the dark crypt in the dead of night, armed only with a flickering candle. Fans of the Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths, will enjoy this. Grave Intent will be published by Canelo Books on 11th June.
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