Say Nothing

This book is in two parts, opening ten years ago with some sinister activity at an abandoned farm in the wilds of Derbyshire while, in a village a few miles away, a small child goes missing from his home. The child’s father is the link between the two events, and the prime suspect when Adam is found murdered. As a result Tommy Henthorn is convicted on circumstantial evidence and spends ten years in jail before new evidence is discovered, when he’s released without a stain on his character and with an inflexible mission to find the real killer.                                                   

Say Nothing is all about families and vulnerable dependants and ten years ago the Henthorns were already known to the local police. There were frequent call-outs to violent “domestics” although there had never been any sign of abuse towards little Adam despite his mother’s addiction to drink and drugs. And to men. It was not a happy family.

But nor was that of the Rains: Tessa and Peter, newcomers to the village. Their boy, Simon, was sixteen, autistic, uncontrollable; dressed up in Commando-type gear, masked and blackened, he haunted the woods. At his last school there was some talk of arson and the Rains had found it circumspect to move house. The parents lived uneasy lives, to be terrified after the murder when they were targeted by a DC Pearson - until Simon, obviously suspect, was exonerated by lack of DNA evidence.  But he was cleared only by forensics and DNA carried no weight in the village; the Rains, Peter and Tessa, walked canny.

And then, to join a list of Tolstoy’s unhappy families (each unhappy in its own way), there was that of Ryan Canfield, the DI heading the investigation. Canfield, respectably married with two adored little girls, was about to slink sideways out of an affair with Lorna, an ambitious young lawyer. When he succeeded her fury at being so shabbily discarded was seismic.

It’s in Part Two that Canfield and Lorna  meet again and the story becomes a triangle between Tommy, now released but wrongfully imprisoned for a decade, Canfield who put him there on false evidence, and Lorna who leads the legal team that has discovered the appalling error which threatens not only  police credibility but Canfield himself: cheat and scapegoat.... And a murderer is walking free.

All very absorbing and colourful but one small figure is forgotten in the melee except by his father who goes doggedly about his mission. And by a wily author working in parallel who now has to untangle a mess of relationships and demonstrate how the families come to terms with guilt and grief, and how, among their extended members, friends and faux friends, the killer is found and brought to book - and all wound up in a homespun homily by one good neighbour at the end.

An old theme but as a village mystery about love and lust and intimidation it has twists that lend it panache and keep the reader guessing all the way.