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 self-confessed serial killer, Seraphina (“Saffy”) Huntley-Oliver discovered her vocation at age twelve: drowning her step-father in the family pool in order to save her baby sister from further abuse.
Saffy went on to kill but only bad men: those who offended her or society: like paedophiles or polluters and other undesirables. She was rich and clever: a ravishing beauty ever alert to the possibility of framing others for her crimes. She was never caught nor suspected; she worked alone, had no lovers, no interest in men other than as potential victims until she chanced on Jon Desrosiers, a celebrated podcaster who investigated and exposed murderers, succeeding where the police and justice failed, finding the true perpetrator when the wrong one had been jailed.
Saffy was enthralled. With their common interest in violent death she was convinced that she had found a soul-mate. She traced him to Scotland and, with the help of a stray dog and Ben Nevis single malt, initiated an extraordinary seduction in the Highlands where Jon had holed up after steering rather too close to the wind in London.
He had become involved in a case incorporating six dismembered cadavers and a missing head. The head was important because, although a man had confessed to five of the murders, he was adamant that he was not responsible for the sixth. However, he admitted that he might have further information and implied that this could include the locality of the crucial head. This was Cyril, one of Jon’s dedicated fans, who would talk, but only to his idol and that in exchange for Jon’s telling his story to the world.
But Jon had his own problems. On the night that his festering marriage ended and his wife walked out, a bin bag stuffed with human remains was left on his doorstep. Framed victim or suspect, regarded by the D.I. investigating (who detested amateur sleuths) - already unbalanced by his wife’s defection – Jon became paranoid: vulnerable to blackmail and blandishments from cops and the irresistible Saffy, eventually from the imprisoned Cyril. He succumbed to the demands of his execrable fan, embarked on a search for the missing head, and forgot to look behind him.
There are no subtleties here but with a good murder to open and a neat and amusing denouement Bad Men is a curiosity: an inverted romance spiked with casual kills. Fashionable and droll, and great holiday reading.
