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.
Thomas Martin is an intelligent and successful advertising man beset by women. His mother and adult sisters live in genteel poverty in an unfashionable corner of Long Island; the girls, their emotional development arrested at an early age, clinging to the security of their crumbling home: a vermin-infested mansion maintained and financed, like its occupants, by the long-suffering Thomas.
He is the good man of the title, mortified yet helpless in the febrile atmosphere of the parental home that contrasts so markedly with the airy exuberance of his own apartment in New York. Here he basks in the normality of his own “two girls”, his beautiful fey wife, and his bright daughter: a typical teen-ager, popular and sassy, bonded to her phone.
Thomas is then as successful in his private life as in business, his fervent affection for his wife undimmed since their chance meeting in Paris years ago, fervency a trifle suspect except that he is the narrator and you feel you should trust his words because his sincerity is so touching. So you castigate yourself for a cynic: suggesting that such a sweet responsible soul, supporting his cantankerous mother, his weird sisters, worshipping his wife and daughter, has to be heading for disaster. But there are hints of some terrible event in the past which, in this disparate family, has to connect with the present.
It’s not until quite near the end of what has been an absorbing tale of shaky domestic balance that we remember this is a crime novel. Perhaps one is prompted by the whiff of incest and the distant death of a third sister, one who mustn’t be mentioned. And then tragedy is implied by the recurring references to opera: Mozart in the golden days when Thomas courted his love in Paris, muted to grand opera as his career and his life start to disintegrate about him. For despite his desperate attempts to discover truth, many truths, to unravel tangled horrors of the past and present, Thomas is close to the edge of a cliff.
The theme of Tannhäuser comes to predominate: the noble anti-hero, the good man who descended into hell, and may be redeemed. Operatically there was a satisfactory ending if not a happy one. So how does Thomas Martin achieve salvation? There are only six essential characters in this drama. Who sinned, who shall pay a price, if anyone? Ourselves wrung out with empathy and suspense we come to an almost unbearable end.
