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.
This promises to be a fun book, but genteel rather than gallows humour, opening with a little old lady investigating a corpse in a confessional. Déjà vu?
The setting is a small village in Perthshire, the corpse that of an unpopular parvenu. There is a whiff of clerical shenanigans, the ambience suggestively naughty, the style reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse. But before we can delve into the histories of the local priesthood or the mystery of Ms Penny Coyne’s being invited to a grand wedding where she knows no one, we are left hanging, as it were, the reader whisked across continents to find an uncouth, foul-mouthed cop in bed with a woman after a steamy night in downtown LA.
Along with this volte-face the style changes, both narrative and dialogue, lapsing to fit its object: Lieutenant Hawke, LAPD, Robbery and Homicide. And now in a post-alcoholic haze he is called out to the suspicious death of a Hollywood scriptwriter – an investigation which will lead him shortly to the wedding in Perthshire and consequently to collision with Ms Penny Coyne.
There a kind of connection is made as each becomes aware of the other’s peculiar interest in murder, and a bizarre alliance evolves to be sealed irrevocably after a shoot-out with some ersatz cops in a Public Library. There is an indication that either Hawke or Ms Coyne has fallen foul of someone or some people as yet unidentified but currently operating in Scotland.
Together they escape to LA, to an unfamiliar world of corporate America where literary publishers are following the money, turning from traditional books to video games. A number of such firms are family-owned, and they’re not only at war but in-house rivalry is savage. No holds are barred; intimidation and blackmail rife; old crimes, old secrets, conspiracy and police corruption have been covered up and the smoking gun was the scriptwriter whose death was the cause of Hawke’s original involvement: the incident that presaged his trip to Scotland. Then he touched only the fringe of something big; now he’s in the thick of a plot going back two decades. At stake is a takeover valued at $4 billion but there is even more at risk: status, reputations, and lives.
Hawke and Coyne are embroiled to the hilt and the action heats up cops-and-robbers style with more shoot-outs, car chases, crashes and other dramatic foibles while in the background the puppeteers fight like rats, and one comes out on top to provide a crazy climax to a clever, disturbing story that’s something between an exuberant romp and the not unfamiliar fantasy of living in someone else’s dream - and waking to find it isn’t a dream at all.
