Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
A man called Orrey escapes from an institution for the criminally insane, killing a guard so casually it’s only afterwards when he mentions leaving his dressing gown cord behind that you realize how it was used.
This incidental killer has one objective: to “rescue” his three-year-old son and escape with him to a fantasy life in the south of France. Little William was taken into the care of his aunt and her husband after Orrey killed his wife. Currently the foster family are spending time with the grandparents at their cottage in Aldeburgh.
William is a diabetic and the action is only long enough to cover a couple of missed injections, but that is too long. Orrey succeeds in grabbing him during the confusion of a local fair. He eludes the police and the distraught family, hoodlums and louts who mistake him for a pervert; he is hunted through the alleys and suburbs of the seaside town, leaving mayhem and death behind in his increasingly frantic flight, unaware of the reason for his boy’s deteriorating condition.
Scenes alternate between members of the adoptive family and the father, Orrey addressing the reader in the first person with cloying chumminess: going into minute detail of his behaviour except in one particular. In the matter of the murders he is so hazy as to imply they didn’t really happen, meanwhile assuring us that whatever did happen was justifiable in order to save William.
There is a reasonable plot in Sweet William which could have worked as a short story where empathy is in abeyance, where character and characters must be honed. Stretched to book length Orrey comes over, not as a sad sick man or a stricken father but as a con artist in love with his wordy self.
