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.
Disappearances are always intriguing and Mina is a skilful writer; to start her latest novel with a disappearance is a hook, for that hook to take the form of a dull review of an amateur film is irresistible. This is an author who signals a clear field before you step on a mine.
Anna, serial sleuth and podcaster, encounters Lisa on-line and watches the woman film herself as, with other UrbExers, she breaks into an abandoned French chateau and stumbles on a Romano-Christian casket, the contents of which will change the world. However, there are ethics in Urban Exploring: nothing may be removed, no addresses of properties released. So much for ethics: the day after the casket is discovered it is listed for auction in Paris at a reserve price of fifty million euros.
Lisa goes into hiding; the casket vanishes and the media goes wild. Lisa is the thief …. she is a victim, murdered by her own father …. she is alive, looking for a fence, a protector, waiting for a godfather to show….
It’s Fin, Anna’s fellow investigator, who epitomises the confidence of the title, maintaining, from their virtual acquaintance with Lisa, that she has her own high principles, is more likely to be acting as guardian of the treasure than the thief. Either way she is naïve and vulnerable: a sitting duck for religious fanatics and art smugglers and organised crime. He convinces the sceptical Anna that speculation is probably correct in one respect: Lisa knows the whereabouts of the casket. They must find her before anyone else.
Their search starts with a fraught family party in a Galloway lighthouse (red herrings galore) and continues through Europe - Paris and Rome most lovingly depicted - becoming an absorbing chase with several different hunters, themselves in opposition, and two sets of quarry: rich powerful predators, wily prey and no certitude of who is friend and who foe.
The characters in this novel are more than finely drawn, they’re dissected, playing with the reader’s perceptions: the outrageous conman from South Africa with the foul-mouthed twelve-year-old son and his dragon-mum, billionaires, hitmen, heavies – even the most obscene of them inciting a reluctant twinge of empathy in the reader.
In this captivating exposé of the underbelly of the art world, with all her artful convolutions of plot and one storm of a crescendo leading to the final subversive joke, Mina has surpassed herself.
