Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”
Ronnie Blake – NOT Veronica, has had one hell of a start in life. Her mother threw herself and Ronnie’s younger brother in front of a train. Ronnie, aged just five, pulled away just in time.
Her half-sister, Jodie, jumped off a multi storey car park, leaving a young son, Noah. Ronnie has left her job as a D.S. in the Met and transferred to Cambridgeshire to live with her half-brother Alex and help to raise Noah.
Before she can properly start her new role, she is rebuffed by her new boss as HR has yet to sign her back to work after the trauma of her sister’s suicide.
At Parkside police station in Cambridge she is co-opted by the ‘Dead’ team, a small specialised squad currently looking into small scale, but extensive blackmail offences. An enquiry in which her recently deceased’s sister’s name has come up.
Ronnie is known as a loner and a poor team player, but has to get into the team mindset to pick at loose edges and tug at threads, with the help of Malachi, another recent joiner from the Met, another outsider, but one who thinks outside the box and has a penchant for hot chocolate with whipped cream!
Acting, sometimes ultra vires, sometimes within, but often without the team and indeed the command chain, Ronnie digs up unpalatable facts about her sister’s life and death. As an outsider, her fresh pair of eyes unearth new leads and eventually assist in resolving both the blackmail offenders and identifying a serial sex offender with a distinctive MO. Her involvement does not come without cost; personal, and potentially professional as well as cost to the team and the force.
For those unfamiliar with Alison Bruce’s previous (brilliant) Cambridge series, this is both a new departure and one which treads familiar ground. The city of Cambridge, with its colleges and its seamier side, is almost a character in itself and the description of familiar locations and locale are a joy. My one regret is that Signorelli’s deli is no longer open on Burleigh Street.
Because She Looked Away is fairly fast paced, and the chapters, 75 of them, are short and punchy. Chapter brevity gives an impression of pace and tension. A sense of frustration is palpable in the main character, reinforced by her childhood trauma, her nightmares about her sister and guilt that she may not have done enough, or done it too late.
The characters are finely drawn with enough of a back-story for even the more minor ones to reveal flaws as well as abilities and strengths. A particularly strongly-wrought character is Noah, the young nephew, in some ways, old beyond his years, but as vulnerable as his tender age would suggest.
The writing is of very high quality, and combined with the setting and very credible plot makes this novel a pleasure to read. It sometimes subtly, but never didactically, reflects wider societal concerns in respect of treatment of ethnic minorities, class divisions, misogyny, the treatment of young women students as well as the failings, moral and professional, of some police officers.
It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book which is, it appears, the start of a new series – I have already ordered the next one. Based on this novel, it has the potential to be as good as, if not better than the Gary Goodhew series.
