Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
A thrusting thirty-something barrister, a Cambridge law graduate, awaits the result of his application to be appointed a Circuit Judge and become thereby the youngest such judge appointed. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it all starts (or does it?) when he gets home and his wife has killed an intruder. Not just killed but stabbed repeatedly, frenziedly, with a letter opener which she just happens to have in the bathroom - claret absolutely everywhere. In case it affects his application, the wannabe judge decides to wrap up the body in the early hours of the morning, and clean up as he is obviously forensically aware, (not) driving, with said wife, and obligatory shovel, to some woods where the pair then bury the body. The fact that he has been systematically defrauding the Inland Revenue, for years, doesn’t seem to worry him over-much in the judgeship stakes. It will however come back to bite him!
What follows is predictable in the main. Wife goes wobbly as she has done before, when they cannot conceive, skeletons come out of the cupboard and the pair are visited by the Old Bill investigating a series of murders by garotting, all of whom, co-incidentally, were at Cambridge with said barrister and one of whose girlfriends he ‘stole’. More lies are told and barrister, now a judge, has a one night stand with his secretary – who predictably gets utterly loved-up and then goes missing when he will not leave his wife.
Wife is ‘au courant,’ as she followed hubby wanting to surprise him. More lies ensue and wife goes missing only to return having been assaulted by hubby and is now apparently pregnant by him - Wow! She promises not to tell the police a) about the assault and b) about the disposal of the body if … wait for it … he tops the secretary to prove his love is true.
Stylistically the book is confused by having chapters written from the point of view of various characters and by a flashback and flash-forward technique which left me occasionally bewildered. Its premise has promise but is clunky in its treatment and of course unintentionally comic!
