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.
A police procedural set in Lisbon (light holiday reading?), two likeable cops and an amiable boss (even better), but there’s an alert: as Inspector Isabel Reis contemplates a body washed up on the shore she feels the breath of a watcher who isn’t present, and it’s revealed that she’s no ordinary cop, but one of the Gifted, and a telepath.
This is not science fiction but a development of existing theories. In Portugal, at a date unspecified but no different from now, Gifted people are spotted when young, groomed, and officially registered as either telepathic or telekinetic. Being highly intelligent they are in a minority and everyone else is Regular. Regulars, for the most part, regard the Gifted as dangerous pariahs and treat them with loathing and contempt. Consequently Isabel, being a telepathic detective, has problems, although not with her partner, Voronov, who is Regular. There is even a hint of sexual attraction: illicit in the circumstances but discernible.
The partners’ current case is that of the mutilated body of a young and once beautiful black woman. Initially she is identified as a worker in a youth centre but her back trail leads to a closer and more sinister connection with one of a number of elite Houses run by the brothers Venâncio. At this point Reis and Voronov find their own case blocked by another department and its six-year investigation of the Venâncios who, it’s suggested, are into something considerably more subversive than suspected trafficking and prostitution.
Protected by powerful people, probably with a mole among the police, this is a highly organised enterprise: despotic and fantastically lucrative, where death is the accepted fate of all informants. In the past few years a number of women have disappeared from the Houses, but the brothers Venâncio have remained inviolate; no one will testify against them, nothing can stick.
But Reis and Voronov are pit bulls and they have bonded with one murdered woman; they have a mission - and Reis is Gifted. That can be dangerous because there are others with the same gift, and telepathy works both ways. Reis walks on eggs.
The House of Silence is no light reading then. The author has more than one axe to grind and, disbelief suspended, the mystery of the Houses gives food for sly thoughts. Sophisticated and spiced with black humour, colloquial and raw in the telling, this is a novel for our times.
