Detective Sergeant Ali Green has been
called back off sick leave to deal with an emergency relating to an earlier
case relating to a series of girls from Norfolk who have disappeared and
believed to have been abducted.
Having tracked the supposed abductor to
his lair, the police find a cage in which the girls have been incarcerated. But
he escapes with one of the captive girls, leaving Ali’s boss dead and herself
and one of her colleagues badly hurt. Subsequently, two further detectives
disappear while on a further attempt to track down both the suspect and the
missing girls. Later their bodies are also discovered in the burnt out wreck of
their car. A further search reveals the bodies of several of the missing girls.
But what exactly is the role of Erica
Shaw, one of the girls who was abducted, but who appears to have helped his original escape from the police, and to
be implicated in the later murders? While her superiors believe the girl may
have turned rogue killer in a Stockholm syndrome effect of her abduction, Ali
believes the girl to be innocent and still operating under duress from her
abductor.
The story continues at a pace,
sometimes outpacing the reader’s capacity to follow. The finale vies in
excitement with the prologue which kicked the book off. And all that might be
sufficient to secure the ready interest of many readers. But if you like to see
a range of robust characterisation, a clearly delineated plot, and more than
that a strong sense of place you may, like me, feel a degree of disappointment
at some of the book’s superficiality.
Dead Girls follows closely on the author’s first
book, so closely there is a wham-bang prologue which compresses the finale of Normal,
and my copy I read also carries the first four chapters. Sadly, both these devises don’t fully help
and reader who embarks unwittingly on Dead Girls. I was certainly lost
for some time, confused over characters and events. So, if you want to get the
full benefits of Dead Girls, read Normal.
But even that preparation may not
resolve all the issues with Dead Girls. Firstly it is a very jumpy text,
often very difficult to follow. Several of the characters flit in and out and
rarely achieve any real body or attract any great interest. Sadly that applies
also to the principal character, Detective Sergeant Ali Green. Ali is much like
several other female cop heroines – she’s feisty, doesn’t get on too well with
superiors or obey orders very willingly, preferring to investigate in her own
way, using her own methods.
But there are also some variations.
Having suffered a head wound in the first book she still suffers the effects, a
degree of forgetfulness, a tendency to talk out loud what she thinks are her
thoughts, and periods when neurological problems cause her leg to collapse on
her, even after a period of leave and counselling. Her sexual orientation is flexible. An
earlier divorce has seemingly disposed of a husband and her interests now
relate more to women. That said, even these relationships appear pretty
shallow, like quite a bit of Ali Green herself.
