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.
Pasadena, California 1962. Grace Polansky, a physics student moonlighting in a diner, falls for a customer, the first man she has met who seems to be on her wavelength. But Bobby Jones is an enigma: recently retired, he seems awkward in his brand-new clothes: even in his skin: a man with a murky background. And seven months after meeting Grace, when armed FBI agents burst into the diner, he is branded a terrorist: accused of planting a bomb in Pasadena City Hall that resulted in twenty-seven deaths
Grace blunders into denial and when Bobby goes on the run she follows him into the bleak western deserts and far beyond, to places out of this world.
The blurb of Psalms is its own spoiler and, coupled with Grace’s obsession with the nature of reality, we are forewarned that this is not only a sci-fi novel but one of fantasy. Crime is implicit – and boy! What crimes.
Assaulted and battered by history the couple travel through time and across continents, participating in epic events in company with a colourful cast of killers, martyrs, legendary lovers: all caught in a cosmic web under the aegis of some shadowy form of Control. This last assumes definition in a running thread through the ages: personified as an agent of sorts, always identified, whether Spanish don or African slave or LA cop, by its bi-coloured eyes.
Over the millennia covered by this saga the reader is made aware that a search is in progress, its focus a small black stone with magical properties. In one venture a character dives on the wreck of the Titanic hoping to find it in a long-lost safe. And elsewhere on this crazy wheel of life a teen-ager builds a bomb in his garden shed, acting on the orders of Allah who adopts the form of a piebald Dutch rabbit. Contract killers scour the globe for ex-Nazis, girls form suicide clubs - and an astronaut returns to earth to discover her gentle husband has slaughtered both their young daughters. From Ancient Rome to a futuristic Japan reality is one long bloodfest.
You may skip the horrors and be bored by the incessant rutting but there is a plot here. There are heroes and villains, a problem and some kind of morality. Having said that, and paid tribute to the exhaustive research involved, it’s an uncomfortable book to read and not one for fans of the Golden Age.
