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.
The time is the near future. People are implanted with a device – known as an iMe – that transmits a signal enabling the authorities to trace their every movement. They have become Model Citizens. Ostensibly there is no crime and everyone is fit, programmed by the Ministry of Wellbeing and Health. Food and drink are monitored, infringements resulting in Excess Consumption Orders; three strikes and the delinquent is sent to a Health Reorientation Camp.
There are subversives. Detective Inspector Lussac is one: a cop of the old school, and there is Mrs Barclay, proprietor of a private and illegal club whose members indulge in the crimes of gorging and bingeing. And there is a sadistic killer whose recorded thoughts we know too well but whose identity is a mystery.
The novel opens with the familiar sequence of stalker, abductor, and a beautiful woman incarcerated in a cage. The difference here being that this abductor has acquired suppressors which block signals from the wearer’s iMe. As DI Lussac starts to investigate, first a missing person, then a suspected murder, he is faced with the seemingly impossible task of tracing a killer who, according to current technology, cannot exist.
Although forced to revert to the old hands-on methods of his youth, Lussac is happy to accept technical assistance from his young sergeant. Zoe is smart, savvy, askance at her governor’s antiquated tactics but the two work well; neither is bigoted and both united against their obstructive superior and the technocrats: the experts maintaining that the system is perfect, signals can’t fail, that there is no murder, only suicide, and therefore no killer.
Another person disappears – a technocrat. Human remains are found, the private club discovered and the form of suppressor that enable its owners and members to block the signal iMe. Suddenly technology is in meltdown and chaos reigns, everyone, from technocrats to cops, suspected of abduction and murder.
As a crime novel Proximity is ingenious although most readers may prefer to skip the torture scenes. It’s as a satire that the book engages: witty and amusing (I loved the macrodrone which, too big to get through a front door, settled in the garden and released six microdrones to enter the house and conduct a forensic search).
The overall message is far from subliminal but the gallows humour is both fantastic and prescient. How long will it be before A. and E. departments of the NHS created from Mr Tugwell’s fertile imagination are swamped with head injuries sustained by people impacting hard objects while walking and absorbed in their phones?
