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.
Two hikers camping near a derelict gold mine are found dead, skewered by their own trekking poles. One body has been dropped down a deep shaft, the other thrown in a toxic lake: the haunt of nameless, possibly mutated horrors and at least one snapping turtle with a head the size of a football.
A footprint is found: too human-like for any bear, too big to be human. We are deep in the wilds of Virginia where Bigfoot (kin to the Himalayan yeti) has his devoted followers, among them top cop Marino who discovers and preserves in plaster the print that is to haunt this latest Cornwell until the end.
If Marino is approaching his sell-by date Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta is still the maverick pathologist, still in her prime. Armed only with pepper spray and bolt cutters, despite her terror of poisonous snakes and creepy crawlers (sic) she braves the derelict workings to be lowered twenty feet down a shaft where she frees one entangled corpse from scaffolding before going on to enter the polluted lake and wrest the second cadaver from the jaws of that outsized turtle.
The victims are quickly identified as the Mansons, husband and wife. Subversives who had been under surveillance by the CIA, they were also of interest to the state police, the FBI, Drug Enforcement …. there are even hints of the Mafia. The couple were sitting ducks and suspects abound.
The plot becomes a maelstrom of conflicting undercurrents; some institutions uncertain how to handle events as they occur, or before they occur, others determined on a cover-up at all costs. Isolated in her morgue, her authority questioned, attended by the repulsive Norm (surely the most insolent medical minion yet); betrayed by the mayor and targeted by a power-hungry governor, Scarpetti feels her own position at risk. The media are scurrilous: murder is no longer news, even mass murder, but murder involving Bigfoot would be a phenomenal scoop. In the gathering frenzy journalists turn rabid.
A hefty book, its infrequent action – quickening to end in a churning snowstorm – is weighted with flashbacks which serve as clues to the current mystery. For throughout, from the curiously primitive killing to the sophisticated zapping of the cat flaps, we are aware of something else, something other in the shadows. In a country permeated with advanced technology but where every stratum of society is threaded with superstition, Cornwell has produced a noir puzzle with jokes, and it works.
