Marie Tierney

I am not sure if this is a first, but it is, in my experience, unusual. Here we have an crime author who has been self publishing his novels for a decade, and now he has been taken on by a major publisher – Penguin Random House, no less. I know personally several authors who self-publish. Theirs is a labour of love, and I believe in most cases they do well to break even financially. I think the term ‘vanity publishing’ is rather unkind, as the term implies something that smacks of puffed-up pride, unjustified by any evidence of quality. Mainstream publishers, just like record companies back in the day when ‘records’ were a thing, are in the business to make money for themselves and their artists and writers. So did publishers back in 2015 have a Decca-Beatles moment with Peter Grainger?

I have yet to turn the first page of this book, first published in 2016, so I cannot say. So, who is Peter Grainger? For many years he taught English at a High School in Chatteris, a small town on the edge of Fenland. His real name is Robert Partridge, and after An Accidental Death came out in 2016, he soon realised that fans of the police procedural genre love a good series. Thus, the Kings Lake series was born. Kings Lake is apparently based on Kings Lynn, and I will be interested to see how the settings compare with how Jim Kelly treats the town in his Peter Shaw novels, of which I am a great fan. Anyone reading this might like to investigate other local writers Diane Calton Smith, Marie Tierney and Russell Wate. The reprint of An Accidental Death will be out on 30th April, and I will alert followers on Instagram, X, Facebook and Tiktok when my review goes live.

The district of Rubery, on the edge between Birmingham and Worcestershire. 1981. Ava Bonney is thirteen years old, She lives with her mum and sisters in a rudimentary council flat. Her dad has flown the coop, but mum Colleen has a feckless boyfriend, Trevor. Ava is an unusual girl. She is fascinated with animal physiology, and absorbs information mostly from books, but also – on the rare occasions when her fellow pupils are not being disruptive – from science lessons at school.

Ava is startlingly intelligent, but also wise enough to disguise herself as an ordinary teenager when needs must. She has an unusual hobby. She collects roadkill – mostly small mammals – and she takes them to secret sites close to her home, and installs them in little shrines. She secretly visits these special places as the remains decompose, and records her observations in a notebook. The largest specimen she has collected is a fox, but when she sneaks out one night to examine it, she has an unpleasant surprise. The smell of putrefaction is far more pungent than she would have expected, but the reason is obvious. Just a couple of yards from the dead fox is the body of a local schoolboy who went missing a couple of weeks earlier.

Not the least of Ava’s skills is a talent for mimicry, and she disguises her voice as that of a well educated middle-aged woman to make a 999 call, reporting what she has found. Another body is found, and then a third boy disappears. By this time, after interviewing local youngsters who knew the boys, Detective Sergeant Seth Delahaye has his suspicions that ‘Miss Misty’, the caller nicknamed after the anonymous woman in the 1971 Clint Eastwood film, is none other than Ava. Given the nature of the wounds inflicted on the boys the police are, despite common sense and experience, coming close to believing that they might be seeking a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who.’

Ava, with the help of her friend John, begins to put together a theory about what might be happening, and she believes that there is a connection to an elderly man – a former farmer and dog breeder – who is languishing in a care home with dementia. Delahaye, meanwhile, is receiving strange and disturbing reports of a large unidentified animal being seen at night in several places. As the police and Ava – in their different ways, close in on the killer, they realise that the truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

In Ava, Marie Tierney has created one of the most startling and original characters in modern crime fiction. I suppose she is a savant, but her gifts are not the result of her being on any kind of autism spectrum. She is super-smart, but also sensitive to the needs and natures of other people.

This is an astonishing novel on so many levels. It combines horror, compassion, dark humour, narrative verve, a deeply embedded empathy with landscape and locale and – above all – Ava Bonney, a truly memorable creation. Deadly Animals is published by Bonnier Books and is available now.