"Crash and burn" by Alison Bruce

An isolated, abandoned bungalow north of Cambridge is burnt down. 2 bodies are found - one new, and one under the floorboards, decades old. Ronnie (Veronica) investigates. She lives with her brother Alex and nephew Noah, 10 (his mother died). Malakei is in the team - young and single, living with his protective aunt. Nathan Paignton (nerdy brother of naughty suspect Alfie, 15) is suspected to be the victim. When Mariel was 2, she and her mother were abducted. Her mother Jacky wasn't seen again. Mariel was left in Trumpington St, where she now works. Chris Good, the son of the bungalow owner (a builder), had disappeared on the same night 20 years before. Mariel thinks she recognises the bungalow in the news article so she contacts the police.

Investigations reveal that the newer body is indeed Nathan's and that he could have started the fire. Alfie befriends Noah while he's walking from school, pretending he's Noah's uncle Owen. Questioned, Alfie says he did it to see if Ronnie is to be trusted. He confesses to Ronnie that Nathan lit the fire to stop Alfie getting into more trobule in the bungalow. Noah does have an uncle Owen, who he's never met. Ronnie arranges a meeting. 2 other bodies are found under the bungalow - women who were kidnapped for a ransom when Jacky disappeared in 2008. Connections emerge between the dead women and Chris Good. Nathan's father Steve, who owns a garage, is interviewed because Jacky had her car mended there. After (it's his PoV now), he writes letters while taking lots of pills with alcohol. He phones Ronnie, who suspects something's wrong. They find him in time. While recovering in hospital he tells the police everything. He'd been in debt and had gone to Chris Good. He ended up abducting women for him, and collecting the ransom money. He spared Mariel and killed Good, putting the body under "an ugly 1998 Fiat Multipla" in his back yard. They go to Mariel. She'd recalled a man saying "Dooboe" and had always wondered what it meant. Malakei says it might have been "Do both". It sparks memories. She recalls her father at the bungalow telling Chris Good to "Do both" (i.e. kill his wife and daughter). She confronts him, secretly recording the conversation. He tells her he married too early and family life got in the way of business. The father's arrested. Alfie stops bunking off school.

I know many of the locations. I like her internal monologues, though the vocabulary register doesn't always sound appropriate. They're not central to the plot. Nor is the Owen incident. I presume it's there for the benefit of a future book in the series. It's well-enough handled all the same. The final twist is rather implausible. The writing's effective - the flashiest phrase is "her forehead flickering with a frown".

"Because she looked away" by Alison Bruce

An audio book, mostly Ronnie's first-person PoV with passages of Fenton's first-person PoV.

Ronnie (Veronica) is moving to Cambridge after 8 years being a policewoman in London. She's moving in with her half-brother Alex who lives with his son Noah, 8. She recalls when she was 3 and her brother George was 5, on each side of their mother. Each night she recalls watching her half sister Jodie die. It happened 6 weeks before. Jodie had thrown herself from a multi-storey car park, having called for Ronnie first to tell her not to let "him" know. Ronnie has not kept in touch with her father.

Ronnie's asked in for questioning. She finds out from a young colleague, Malackie Henry, that Jodie's name has been mentioned in association with a convicted gambler Nigel Beckett, husband of a policewoman. Ronnie contacts the wife (Linda, who's since had a stroke) and questions her husband in prison. He warns her not to investigate further - he fears for his family's safety. Lots of money that he'd won has never been accounted for.

Linda tells Ronnie about the death of a young local policewoman involved in her husband's case, Kirsten McCloud, found drugged, tied and killed in her own bath.

Jodie had once told Ronnie how she'd woken up once in a situation like McCloud's - drugged, raped but alive. The rapist was Noah's biological father. It had happened when she was in her first term at Cambridge. She left University soon after. So there's a connection between Jodie's death and the Beckett case. But how had her colleague known? He'd been told to leak the info by his boss Fenton. In the Lord Byron pub, Trumpington, Fenton tells her about Operation Byron - someone is blackmailing people. Fenton had recently been tipped off about 3 people involved in the blackmailing - Beckett, Jodie, and the dead Dr Zoe Richardson. Now that her sister's seemingly involved, Ronnie shouldn't investigate the case.

They interview Zoe's final partner - Prof Colin Knox. At the end they weren't living together because of her drinking problems. The prof recalls Jodie. They interview others who were blackmailed.

Ronnie becomes suspicious about Operation Byron. Fenton says that the team's struggling to justify itself. Who posted the note listing the 3 people? And need the rapist be the same person as the blackmailer?

DNA tests on Noah suggest that his father is one of Zoe Richardson's sons. Colin Fox knew she was being blackmailed about something. Could the rapist still be the blackmailer too, a son blackmailing his mother? Kirsten McCloud was involved with the admin of some other suspects' traffic offences. Maybe she leaked info to the blackmailer?

Dimitri (in her group) discovers a chat-room dialogue involving the rapist. Gemma, also in her group, suspects Dimitri for leaking info.

Owen Richardson is Noah's father. He claims he and Jodie had sex days before the day of the rape. Ronnie sets a trap to make Fox reveal that he's the rapist. Ronnie gets Tess (a team member) to trick Gemma into revealing that she was the blackmailer. At the end loose ends are tidied up.

I think the plot works. Ronnie, Noah and Alex seem surprisingly free of grief given Jodie's recent death.

Other reviews

• promotingcrime (The various strands are teased out in unexpected ways and the twists and turns make it difficult to spot the criminals. The story is a gripping read with some dark parts, but short chapters keep the pace going and encourage the reader to read just a bit more.)

"The Backs" by Alison Bruce

Genevieve, 34 is walking through backstreets to the Cambridge Beer Festival when she sees a stabbed women in a garden. While she's giving CPR she's stabbed too.

7 years later, a burnt out car is found, conspicuous on the Gogs outside Cambridge. A dead man (Paul Marshall) is tied to a nearby tree. A tall blond barefoot girl is seen there.

Jane Osborn, living near Leeds, has had her hair done. A new start. She's leaving Ade. She's caught shoplifting. The Cambridge police are contacted - she's been a missing person since she was 15. Her sister Becky was the stabbed woman in the garden. She died but Gevenieve survived. Her husband Jimmy talks to DI Goodhew, saying that her wife hasn't mentally recovered. She's not sure that Jackson (who was convicted of the crime and has recently been released) is guilty. Vital evidence has somehow been comprised - a police error.

Jane is questioned. She knows about her sister but doesn't say. She moves into the family house, which is about to be sold (father lives in his studio, mother gone, brother and family live nearby). Jane tells the police she wants to contact her mother, Mary. Meanwhile she cleans the cellar. The police track "Mary Oliver" to France, but it's someone who exchanged identities with the real Mary.

Like the Oliver family, the police characters also have their pattern of interaction. Goodhew and Kinkaid don't get on. Kinkaid seems strangely sociable.

Jackson pleads innocence to Jane. He's living in a house while he's doing up. Jane knows that he had sex with her mother and with Becky.

Marshall owned a boat. Initially his widow says that she didn't know about it. Later, after forensic analysis she admits that her husband had aggressive sex urges and she knew he'd been with prostitutes. The police track down the stray girl by her tattoo. She's a student, Andy, who worked for an Escort Agency. Marshall had hired her for a weekend when anything was allowed, for £5,000. He'd hurt her. The agency was run by her landlord and his wife - the Daltons. Jackson is repairing one of their houses. They used to work with Mary, whose body is found in the Osborn's cellar. Becky had been a prostitute with the same Escort Agency.

Jane knew Marshall?

Kinkaid had invalidated the evidence for the sake of the Daltons (Kinkaid had been using their services too). Dan had killed his mother (so an immoral person like her wouldn't benefit from the divorce). His father's artwork had risen in value because of Becky's death. Dan gained from that too. He killed Becky. He tries to kill Jane but is stopped.

I like the internal monologues and the dialogues. The plot mechanics aren't too creaky.

• There's little or no action on "The Backs" - 2 woman were stabbed in the back though
• "Following the road as it slipped up Castle Street" needs tidying up
• The Cambridge police drove Jane from Leeds to Cambridge for questioning then released her in the night. That doesn't sound right.

Other reviews

• Goodreads

"The Calling" by Alison Bruce

An audio book.

2009 - a woman is in a bath. She's cut herself - "each droplet billowed" in the water. A man enters the house, finds her.

2011 - Margaret and Mike Whiting are short of money. Their son Steve is living at home, unemployed. Daughter Michelle is in a sexually-submissive relationship with Karl (a van driver) who prefers Kay. They're about to go on holiday. The other daughter Kay hasn't turned up to the family gathering - the 80th birthday of Margaret's mother. Margaret's 46 year-old brother Andy Burrows bottled out of the meeting. Margaret called the police about Kay's absence.

DC Goodhew, 26, has split with Clare. He asks car mechanic friend Brin if he wants to go on the holiday he's already booked. Brin's sister Shelley is a pretty flirt.

The Flying Pig, a Cambridge pub, is frequented by a lone girl, a regular for 2 years, with scars, pops in at 11.45am as usual for coffee. The girl's seen someone who looks like her, Paulette. She sees a man (Peter Walsh) still with her, going for lunch. She realises that he likes women who are like her, but not her. She cuts Kay's picture from page 1 of the newspaper. She thinks she looks like Kay.

The police get an anonymous call from a woman saying that Kay's still alive and that they should arrest Peter Walsh.

Kay, gagged, has been dumped by a flooded quarry near Ipswich. She dies.

Goodhew's colleague Kinkaid, unhappily married, is jealous of Goodhew because their boss Marks gives Goodhew slack and Goodhew somehow has his own house in Cambridge. He convinced that the criminal's within the family. Goodhew's colleague Sue Gully shyly fancies him.

On the day of her disappearance Kay was in Woodbridge and got a card for a Mother's birthday. Andy was in Woodbridge that day, and Kay had been in his car. He's arrested. He says that on the drive back she got out because she thought he was drunk.

The grandmother dies. Pete goes out with his colleague Donna. Goodhew meets on holiday then returns after a day because he thinks that the girl he's seen at The Flying Pig was the anonymous caller. She's seen him and has fantasised about him.

Another girl's body is found. Same MO.

We learn that the woman watching from the pub is Marlow. She misses Pete, and he still thinks about her. Pete dumps Juliette, the latest victim.

Goodhew lists Pete's 5 girlfriends and the victims. They're all similar. Pete's brougoes through her expeght in for questioning just before he had a date with Fiona. Marlow is pulled from the same lake as Kay's body had been in. Was she the killer? Goodhew goes through her extensive logs and realises that he kills one girlfriend when he finds a new one. Marlow promises that she can make Pete lead them to the latest victim, Lisa, who might still be alive. She ties up Julie, his current girlfriend, so that she can't be contacted. Goodhew releases Pete, who takes Marlow to where Lisa is to dump them together, but they're being tracked by police helicopter and Goodhew in a car.

"The moment before impact" by Alison Bruce

An audio book, set in Cambridge

Initially there’s an alternation of court action and past-tense narration of the evening of the crash.

Nicki had been on the same uni crime course as Ellie, who’d seen something. She was thinking of leaving the course. Callum and Ellie were lodgers with Celia, who'd been a reporter for 22 years. Jamaican roots. She's a part-time lecturer. She knows the youths involved. Nicki had been driving when an accident killed Charlie, Jack's younger brother, and Ellie. Nicki and Charlie had been friends for years. She was found guiltly but didn't recall significant details. 3 years later she comes out of prison. Celia rents out a house to her. Her remarried father’s a detective. She reads criminology books in the public library. She comes home drunk at 11. Celia follows her one night and finds that she meets drinkers/druggies in Mill Road cemetery. Celia saves her from an assault.

Celia's PoV and Nicki's PoV dominate.

They try to track all the surviving occupants of the car because Nicki thinks she was attacked in the car or just after the accident. Nicki goes to Jemma, who lives in Tenison Road. She's an invalid, on painkillers.

Jack returns to Cambridge to live in his father's vacated house on Celia's street, Mawson Rd. He was married and had a child. Now he's separated. He's an architect.

By now Nicki's been with Celia for a year. She has trained as a tattoo remover. She steals Jack's DNA and finds a newspaper cutting about Becky, a woman who'd been murdered and dumped in water. Callum claimed friendship with her. Callum has a history of inappropriate sexual behaviour. Emily Moore was another case. Both had been held captive for a while before being drowned. Celia tries to get her police friend Briggs to follow the clues of the old cases.

We jump to a captive woman's PoV - mouth taped. He has sex with her. She's Louise.

Jack suspects that Nicki has broken into his house. Celia talks to him, trying to convince him otherwise, convincing him that there's no point him reporting the event to the police. They go to Hot Numbers in Gwydir St to talk. Jack says that his daughter Maya was the result of her wife's affair. He says he'd been sent other clipping too, about women who'd disappeared. Some later reappeared alive. He dropped Callum off once at a place beyond Norwich, near where a woman's body had been found. The 2 drive off for Norwich. He wants to case closed - he doesn't want Nicki pestering him. They go to Yarmouth and search the room where Callum lives (though he's been away for a while). True crime books, anatomy books, more news cuttings. One about Louise.

We learn that Gemma supplies drugs (her painkillers) to Callum. Then suddenly Gemma's nasty brother Rob appears (Celia had visited his local workplace when he was absent). She doesn't want to tell Rob where Callum is because she wants to protect Callum. Rob says he keeps women - Ellie had known his secret. Nicki might be next. He forces Gemma to take an overdose while Nicki was unconscious next door.

Jack goes round to Gemma's, suspicious. He'd been there several times as a kid. From outside he sees Gemma in trouble. He phones 999. Ambulance. Too late.

Rob drives off with Nicki in the boot. He takes her to his gym. Another woman's there. Jack saves them.

Callum is recovering in Addenbrooke's. Briggs is interviewing him. Callum fancied Gemma when they were on a paramedic course. He recounts what happened on the day of the crash. Ellie had been hysterical. A car had come at them, maybe with its lights out. Charlie had yanked the wheel to avoid the car. They hit a tree. Rob had been driving the other car. Gemma made Callum promise not to tell. At the trial there seemed to be no evidence against Rob, so Callum thought that if he told the trust it would only have been his word against the evidence. Without any proof he thought that all missing women in the press had been taken by Rob.

3 weeks later - Nicki receives 2 letters. One is offering her a place on the Anglia Ruskin University course she gave up. Another is the results of a DNA on Maya - proof that Maya is Jack's daughter after all.

In an attempt to keep the plot tidy, credibility is rather strained.

"The Promise" by Alison Bruce (Constable, 2014)

The audio book version, read well by Jonathan Broadbent (though he pronounces "Gwydir Street" as "Gweedir Street"). It's set in Cambridge. I know all the locations (I lived in one of the streets). When a character turns left at a junction I know where they're going.

A parallelism starts the story. Gary Goodhew and Sue (they're police - Gary's having time off after injury) are haunted by the death of a colleague, Kelly. Kyle (25, father of 20-month-old Harry and husband of Hannah) is haunted by the death of Lilla. Badly injured while being a soldier, he's living in Cambridge. Hannah's put them into debt.

A vagrant is found having been violented murdered in market square, one of Gary's occasional informers. The eyes have been mutilated. Gary turns up for work because he wants to investigate the case. At first they don't even know the victim's name - he's "Ratty" to them. They find a decomposed woman's body in a lock-up that someone using Ratty's name has been renting for years. The corpse has the same mutilated eyes as Ratty had. Kyle's fingerprints are there.

Sue discovers that Gary's grandfather was murdered in his house when Gary was 11 and that Gary doesn't know. All the older generation of policeman do (a wave of them, including Gary's boss, are reaching retirement age). Gary's grandmother knows too. It was her idea to keep the nature of the death secret.

In Chapter 21 (of 58) a (new?) first-person voice appears - a man whose wife of 21 years suddenly leaves him, taking their 2 daughters. In a later chapter he moves from Cambridge to near Ely, and seems to have decided that the best way to deal with grief is impose worse grief on others. He uses words like "meander" and makes a craft demo at a market into an extended metaphor about life.

Meanwhile Kyle's hiding in Hannah's loft wondering whether to fight or flee. He tells his little sister that he found a body in a lock-up garage while attempting petty theft, and blackmailed the person who used the garage. That person had threatened Kyle's family, which is why Kyle was in hiding.

Hannah's found dead, eyes mutilated. Leah had disappeared. By now Gary knows that Addis, the police doctor, is the murderer. They find Kyle, who doesn't trust the police at first. Kyle arranges a meeting with Addis at 2am near the football stadium, the police in position. Addis is arrested Leah is saved (she's in another lock-up garage).

The final chapter's much longer than the previous dozen or so. It begins "Three days later." Addis has been writing a book about grief. There are extracts from his "research" - his plan was to study 10 families for 10 years. There's an epilogue beginning "Two weeks later". Gary recalls more about the day of his grandfather's murder. He was in the house when it happened, hiding under a bed, which he'd promised his grandfather to stay under.

Many of the characters are surprisingly self-analytical. Leah in particular is far too insightful. It's fair enough for an author to articulate a character's thoughts on their behalf, but it goes further than that.

Some passages are literary, or describe near-telepathy. Telepathy's useful when the author wants to remain invisible.

• "Her bedroom has been emulsioned in a shade of mint green. It had dried more turquoise and she preferred it that way. Streetlamps and moonlight kept it toned down to grey, but now she could pick out a film of colour and she tried to work out whether extra light was also filtering up the stairs and through her doorway" (Ch 4)
• "He held Marx's gaze until he was sure that the correct unspoken message had passed between them. It was an almost invisible softening of his boss's expression that told him it had" (Ch 10)
• "She heard a slight edge to her voice and in return a sudden stubbornness in his expression. Goodhew masked it by passing her a can of Pepsi" (Ch 37)

The phrasing seems clumsy in places -

• "She was on her own, literally" (introduction)
• "The distant thoughts were muddy in his thinking" (Ch 3)
• "For a moment she drifted back to the moment when" (Ch 37)

Were it read at a workshop I might comment that

• There are too many words. For example, the dialogue's good and doesn't need its nuances explained.
• When the author has something to say, PoV-integrity is cheaply breached.

It's a page-turner.

Other reviews

• John Cleal (this sixth story in the series makes me wonder if Alison Bruce isn’t running short on ideas for her conflicted, obsessional, but intuitive hero. ... The story works well enough as a standalone, but constant references to past incidents make it more difficult to understand either Goodhew and his idiosyncrasies or even the more straightforward Gully.)
• Jim Napier
• viewson (It is a good enough book and one that I would not have stopped reading. That said I simply didn’t find it as tense or as compelling as I would have liked this sort of police thriller to be. As I’ve said I found Gary Goodhew a good character and that would apply to Sue Gully to some degree. However most of the other characters lacked some depth for me.)
• goodreads

"The Siren" by Alison Bruce (Constable and Robinson, 2010)

Likes

I thought this novel began much better than her previous one, Cambridge Blue, did. It continues temptingly too. I like the pacing and the context-changes. I especially like how the tension is built up on p.126. Goodhew through a telescope sees, as if split-screen, 2 scenes develop and collide. And the novel's final paragraph is good.

There are sentences that are worth reading in themselves -

• "And if marriage carried kudos, so did age: in some cases a mark of achievement and in others a measure of loss" (p.2)
• "Perhaps that was all hindsight really was: the chance to see clearly what was originally clouded by the emotion of the moment, rather than anything to do with the passage of time" (p.48)

Dislikes

There's less breath-drawing than her previous book, but it persists - "Rachel drew a deep breath" (p.13); "Kimberley drew a long breath" (p.31); "She drew a deep and calming breath" (p.227)

There's still some awkward phrasing -

• "He wanted to keep walking - past the police station and on to wherever Stefan was hiding, there to find Riley and bring him home. He recognised a metaphor as he thought one" (p.81)
• "Sue Gully loved to drive and, while she couldn't fathom Goodhew's apparent lack of interest in getting behind the wheel, it suited her far more than being the one in the passenger seat" (p.241)

Plot/character

I thought that in the end the child would be ransomed by someone who knew who had taken the 300,000 euros. The final explanations didn't quite convince me, but there was so much going on by then that it didn't matter. There were earlier problems for me, more with character than plot.

• Kimberley doesn't (try to) show emotion when told that Rachel's dead.
• I'm surprized that Kimberly disqualifies herself from motherhood.
• Kimberley's distrust of authority is told rather than shown -
  • "She'd immediately picked up on Kimberley's discomfort whenever around the police, and Gully's instincts told her this extended to all kinds of authority figures - including those who pushed bureaucracy, or anyone who colluded with them" (p.55)
  • "She looked at him and he suddenly wondered if this was the first time she's made proper eye contact with anyone, not masked with fear of grief, or blinkered by her obvious disdain for authority" (p.64; Marks' PoV)
• I'm surprized that on p.135 Goodhew didn't try to set the matter straight. I guess he doesn't always do what's best for himself.
• On p.221, Gully phones an unknown number - "On the fifth ring it was answered. 'Hello?'/It was Anita McVey's voice". I'm impressed that Gully was able to immediately recognise the voice. Were the answer 'Hello. Anita McVey speaking' that implausibility would disappear.
• Some of the development depends on us accepting that the injury has to be inflicted by strong kicks rather than a heavy implement. I wasn't convinced.
• The plane on p.285 seems odd - a lot of effort for an unconvincing alibi.

Puzzles and surprizes

• "the owner, a forty-five-year-old man with a quiff and a London accent, introduced himself as Raj" (p.93). Who knows his age? Who cares anyway?
• On p.134 it says "Goodhew had no idea about playing chess". I though in the previous book he knew more.

Observations

On p.122-3 there's a rapid successions of different PoVs. Works ok. On p.216 and p.250 we suddenly get new PoVs when new characters appear. Again, it works.

On p.173 "run-thorugh" is a typo.

Other reviews

• Maxime Clarke (Eurocrime) (Matters become quite dramatic at the end of the novel, but although exciting, the rationale and actions of the criminal do not seem that credible to me ... Goodhew is a character in whom it is a bit hard to believe ... The author has not got the balance quite right yet between the procedural aspects and the personal problems of the police)
• Mysterious reviews
• Sarah Hilary (Multiple points of view are handled with real skill by the author ... Bruce has a talent for drawing characters to life in just a few sentences ... Most impressively, Bruce ensures that every character has a moral core, whether decent or rotten)

"Cambridge Blue" by Alison Bruce (Constable and Robinson, 2008)

Plot

Once the novel gets into its stride it's quite readable. We're shown who does the crimes at the start.

• Would Jackie really have thrown the knife away? Much later some psychological justification's provided for this, but it's not convincing. And do bodies sink in river water?
• Goodhew's mother has perhaps too minor a role. Goodhew's chess get too brief a mention. Marks' family is initially mentioned but never appears again.
• It's strange that the police didn't initially find the junk-mail. I could have done without the junk-mail entirely.
• The plot-unravelling on p.260 onwards happens too fast for me (but I have the same trouble with many whodunnits)

Point-of-view (PoV)

The story adopts several of the characters' point-of-views (Jackie, Lorna, Alice, Marks, Kincaide, Bryn, Victoria, Nel), but mostly Goodhew, the detective. It's not always clear whether the author or a character is commenting in passages like "Each stared at the other with a kind of respectful curiosity. Marks strummed the desk and looked like he was trying to read Goodhew's thoughts" (p.37). Around p.186 there's a passage where Goodhew's PoV is interrupted by Victoria's PoV, starting slightly back in time, then Goodhew's PoV is continued from where it left off. It works well.

On p.259 it says that "Goodhew told him" [i.e. Marks] where he thought a body had been buried but we're not told. I've read other books where the PoV character keeps the reader in the dark but it's irritating all the same.

Language

About a dozen pages into the book I began to get a fix on some stylistic traits

• Placement of adverbs - they immediately follow the verb
• Phrasal verbs - the components are together; i.e. "he made up the story" rather than "he made the story up". On p.12 for example there's "Lorna swung up the hinged end of the reception counter and slid back the glass partition which led to her office" (p.10)
• Delexical verbs - they're quite frequent; "took a step back" (p.9) (rather than "stepped back"); "The junk mail made a heavy thud" (p.10)

More variety of sentence structure would help.

Sentences

There are problems at the sentence level

• In "It took Goodhew no effort to look indifferent as a reply as he scanned the pub again. This time saw her. 'And there she is,' he said loudly, for Kincaide's benefit" (p.31) I detect several infelicities -
  • "to look" is an unfortunate choice of words, given that the person's looking around.
  • The "as a reply as" repetition is avoidable
  • "This time saw her" is a typo, but is the sentence needed anyway?
  • Is "for Kincaide's benefit" needed?
• In "the mercurial Cam flowed on her left, grey and swift today; like cold molten metal" (p.4) why have "grey ... molten metal"? If "mercurial" doesn't convey this, why have it?
• In "Without warning, he rose and walked towards the window, stopping just before it" (p.93) is "Without warning" or "stopping just before it" needed?
• Does "On top of his pile of papers lay a ten-by-eight photograph, face down. He turned round it to face the assembled group" (p.107) contain a typo?
• "They sat at the back, at the table furthest from the door" (p.125) - is "at the back," needed?
• "He noticed that her eyes were unnaturally blue, but then her skin was unnaturally tanned, and it was hard to tell if either was genuine" (p.132). If they're unnatural they're not genuine.
• "Although Goodhew found its new wine-bar guise about as dynamic as a house full of magnolia walls; he still felt a nostalgia for the building itself" (p.137). A strange semi-colon.
• After a page obsessively showing a man's OCD behaviour there's show-and-tell - "Here the pristine and symmetrical ruled, as the big man struggled to keep control of his surroundings" (p.168)
• When Victoria is making an escape "for the first time she noticed how the gateposts were topped with stone figures of eagles with books under their feet. She glanced up at them, and they glared back down, looking ready to fly off and scatter loose pages into the streets of Cambridge" (p.198). It seems a strange time to have such thoughts.
• "But she kept walking, because she had no choice. There was nowhere else to run" (p.199). The 2nd sentence doesn't follow on well from the 1st.
• "In one direction there were rows of chained-up, riderless bikes" (p.201). Do we need to be told that they're riderless?
• "definately" (p.216). Typo?
• "The only sound now came from the hand-me-down fridge freezer" (p.216). Goodhew's PoV. Hayley and Thompson's house. How does Goodhew know about the history of the fridge?
• "There was an audible trembling in his voice" (p.275)

Fixations

• We're told the women's heights to the inch - "in two-inch heels [Lorna] made five foot five. Just" (p.11); "Alice Moran was just over five feet eight" (p.17); "[Alice] sat upright making the most of being five eight" (p.70)
• There's much drawing and breathing - "she drew deep breaths" (p.5) "his face drew closer to her, his breath hot" (p.6) "drew closer to the door" (p.9)"he drew a sharp breath of recognition" (p.27), "drew in a therapeutic lungful of air" (p.30), "took a quick breath" (p.36), "took a breath" (p.37), "drew in one deep breath" (p.73), "drew a deep and weary breath" (p.93), "drew a couple of quick breaths" (p.195)

Effective imagery and passages

• "On sunny days he could see [the water-cooler] sparkling from his own window and it looked turquoise, the way a lagoon looks from twenty thousand feet" (p.35)
• "her breath came like the little huff children use to steam up windows" (p.44)
• "It was funny how just having a name made a difference. All four of them turned their attention to the corpse's face: it was an automatic reaction to hearing her name. Lorna Spence. Oval face. Wide mouth. Freckled skin. Hazel eyes. Feathered hair./ It was a bit like a dot-to-dot game, where the name join them up." (p.66)
• "He raised both hands from his sides and then dropped them again, a kind of pointless penguin-thinking-about-flying type gesture" (p.104)
• "'You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone'" (p.171)

Summary

Far too many sentences are sloppy, distractingly so. The language suffers when the author's trying to build suspense or combine too much introspection with dialogue. I found the characters believable - Victoria and the criminals least so. I'd have liked to know more about the family life of Alice, Richard etc.

Other reviews

• Maxine Clarke (Eurocrime)
• Milo
• Lisa Briggs-Hardy