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.
DS Miles saves a badly beaten woman from drowning and, as a consequence, finds himself disastrously bonded with her - to the bewilderment of his steady partner, DS Grey.
In hospital Angela, the victim, recovers, refuses to talk, and disappears, to reappear a few hours later as the svelte trophy wife of a ruttish elderly contractor who rules his business empire by some covert form of intimidation that has every employee terrified to death.
No one escapes this man, Corrigan. Angela could but won’t; a friend who tries to help her is murdered, his mate hangs himself rather than talk to the police; Corrigan’s former aide is crushed by his own car. The cops are far from immune; DS Miles suffers cruelly.
There is no mystery, no suspense, only a mild curiosity as to how Corrigan is to be stopped. We know from the start that this is a tale of domestic abuse but so does everyone else; to hang a plot on a secret that is no secret makes for a construction that would collapse under its own weight except that, the odd murder failing to stimulate the reader, the rack is turned full circle, and then again. This passes for the climax; the rest of the story is virtually recap.
A mawkish style and stilted dialogue contrast oddly with a blow-by-blow account of insalubrious perversion followed by miserable post mortems more suited to the pages of a forensic text book. There is no end, no resolution; either the author tired of her theme or she is contemplating a sequel. Readers who manage to finish Woman in the Water will have had enough.
