Under The Marsh

Northern Scotland is bleak, damp and the people are hardy souls, despite being constantly weather-beaten. In Halliday’s latest crime fiction novel, the phrase ‘wear a big coat’ is much more than protection from a chill wind.

A convicted mass murderer in a remote and forbidding lifers’ prison has the sort of confidence that only comes from knowing she will never leave. Life means life for Pauline Tosh, but when she directs DI Monica Reynolds to a weighed-down woman’s body in a marsh that floods with the tide, does she convict herself of yet another murder or lay down clues that someone else might be responsible.

DI Monica Kennedy– we’re on first name terms almost immediately in this conversational-style mystery that gradually gathers pace – has a sackful of personal problems resulting from a trauma in a previous investigation in London. It was a reason for her return to the wilderness around Inverness, but the effects of their history down south threaten her and her daughter’s new lives. Characters have three dimensions throughout the book and the reader is open to decide whether their faults are forgivable or tend towards questionable.

The author is intent on exploring the countryside of the Scottish Highlands and towering, mist-clouded mountains appear like massed Toblerones, some even with peaks and all forming a powerful, oppressive backdrop to the action, which inevitably involves a series of enthralling twists and turns.

Under The Marsh creates a maze of mysteries and plots. They make the crime fiction raison d’etre of ultimately dispensing justice a formidable task. Under a less adept author the task would prove to be difficult, stilted and methodical. Her, it’s in the hands of a master literary technician who gently drives the interlinked, woven strands to a satisfying conclusion.