FALLING

One snowy winter night a plane falls from the sky over Cardiff, elsewhere the young female PCSO is found murdered. Four people are linked together by the twin tragedies, the father of the murdered woman, a stewardess who survived the crash, her estranged husband one of the police officers investigating the murder and the daughter of the pilot of the doomed plane.

The impact of these two traumatic events on her four characters is the focus of Emma Kavanagh’s excellent debut novel. Each one must uncover and come to terms with dark truths about their lives and relationships that will change their lives forever.

This is handled with the forensic insight into the darkercorners of the mind and motivation you would expect from a former police psychologist. Emma Kavanagh brings to this a feeling for pace and characterisation that is remarkably assured for a first time novelist. Her setting is resolutely suburban, making the angst of her protagonists all the more shocking due to the mundane nature of their surroundings.

This is a thoughtful, often dark and devastatingly honest novel that uses the conventions of the crime genre to investigate those aspects of family life that are often kept hidden away. Falling marks the arrival on the crime scene of a major new talent, one with the potential to join the likes of PD James and Ruth Rendell as a writer who thrills her readers by making them think.

Adam C.