The book is set in the Britain of 1949. A strange place and no mistake. Strange? We had won the war, hadn’t we? To the victor the spoils? The reality is very different. The country is spent. Exhausted. Food and comfort are as scarce as they were six years earlier. Clement Attlee’s Labour government is trying to rebuild a country brought to its knees by five years of bombs, rationing, death and destruction. International politics and diplomacy are chaotic. America is, on the one hand, busy rounding up the less egregious former Nazi scientists and intelligence agents to work for them while, on the other, fiercely fighting the growing influence of the not-so-avuncular ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin.

Caught up in this is British intelligence agent Beattie Cavendish. She works for the embryonic ‘listening agency’ GCHQ, and is sent up to Kilbray in the Scottish Highlands, posing as a secretarial instructor, to investigate a suspected leaking of information to the Russians. Readers new to the series will be unaware of Beattie’s recent history, of her time with the resistance in Occupied France, of her older brother, missing presumed dead, and her relationship with the battle-scarred Irish private investigator Corrigan. Rest assured, the author inserts these ‘catch-ups’ into the story smoothly and without disrupting the drive of the narrative.

When she arrives at Kilbray, Beattie expects to be reunited with her paternal uncle Howard, something of a family black sheep, but not unconnected with the intelligence community and international subterfuge. When she arrives at his loch-side cottage, he is not there. It is, however, something of a Marie Celeste situation. Whisky glasses are on the table, and food is in the cupboards. Also AWOL is Commander Henry Swaffer, the officer in charge of Kilbray. Local rumour has it that the thrice-married gentleman has gone on a fling with his latest girlfriend, a young German woman called Klara. That theory is severely tested when a dog-walker (where would crime fiction be without them?) finds Swaffer’s body washed up on the beach. It appears he has been strangled and his body cast into the waves.

Swaffer’s German friend Klara makes herself known to Beattie, but is then fatally stabbed in broad daylight in what appears to be a professional hit, and there is still no sign of uncle Howard. Beattie senses that the answers may lie in a mysterious establishment at Balgowrie, a place known as ‘the cooler’. During the war it was a sinister mix of refuge and prison, a place where agents who had lost their nerve, or escaped from failed missions, were confined. Beattie and Corrigan finally break into Balgowrie, and their invasion precipitates a violent and exciting dénouement.

Ann-Marie Riley also hints at the eternally fraught relationship between Britain and the Irish Republic. Thousands of men from southern Ireland gave their lives for Britain in The Great War, but by 1939, Ireland was resolutely neutral. Or was it? In the real world, men like Corrigan who had fought against the Nazis would be subsequently marginalised and denied pensions. Post 1945, committed Nazis like Célestin Lainé and Otto Skorzeny would be welcomed by the Irish state, and sheltered from the retribution facing fellow former Nazis. Riley isn’t trying to right ancient wrongs. She is merely setting out the sometimes unpleasant aspects of history and they actually happened.

You would be wrong to assume from the alliterative title and the cover graphics that this is a cosy crime story. Yes, Beattie is a perfect ladies’ book-reading-circle heroine. Certainly, there are occasional ‘Boys’ Own’ elements to the story, and perhaps the damaged PI Corrigan – who won his medals and his scares in the sheer hell of Monte Casino – can sometimes be too gung-ho for his own good, but Mary-Jane Riley takes a long hard look at a Britain struggling for identity, self-preservation, and searching for old certainties that have been blown away by the strong winds of a brutal post-war world. Beattie Cavendish and the Highland Hideaway will be published by Allison & Busby on 19th February.

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