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.
Auckland,
New Zealand 1995, and the protagonist, Matt Buchanan, then a rookie cop,
introduces his story explosively with the shooting dead of his friend and
colleague and the wounding of her partner.
Sixteen
years later, now a seasoned detective, Matt’s seen it all but retains his
humanity, dealing kindly with a rape victim and her bewildered parents. And
he’s deeply affected when the disintegrating body of another girl is found in a
sack in a mangrove swamp: a horrifying reminder of one who went missing on her
way to school twelve years ago: one of Matt’s cases but never solved. A child
killer is walking free.
This
book presents as a police procedural with varied cases running concurrently:
rape, homicide, trafficking, paedophilia, but shortly it resolves itself into
one ramified case, one plot comprising a number of crimes involving missing
girls. Running parallel is the wholesale manufacture of drugs where, curiously,
there is no evidence of wealth. It would seem that profits are ploughed back
into the business or used merely as the means for concerned individuals to
indulge their own crazy forms of depravity.
There
is a naïveté
about the novel. Written by a retired cop in gutter speak with all its limited
vocabulary it strives for sophisticated porn but is curiously reminiscent of
teenage smut. Technically the detail
is good: in the working of cases in a different country, in the manufacture of
drugs. And there’s a nice turn to the plot where, after a particularly bloody
shoot-out, Matt leaves the police and, counselled only by a good priest, takes
a job as a flying instructor.
Then,
after the discovery of another girl’s body and the belated suspicion that a
serial killer has been at large since his unsolved case of years ago, Matt’s lured
back to a force in dire need of a steady hand with vast experience. But events
and human nature conspire; Matt is strong meat and now, answerable to no one
other than his demons, he follows his own course and all hell breaks loose,
leading to an extraordinary climax.
Matt
Buchanan is no Roderick Alleyn despite the book’s being shortlisted for the
Ngaio Marsh Award but bright boys will revel in it.
