No Place to Die by Clare Donoghue
| No Place to Die by Clare Donoghue | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: An excellent second novel from Donoghue, with Lockyer somewhat off the piste, DS Bennett gets control of her first real murder case. Tightly plotted with moments of real mystery and suspense. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 300 | Date: March 2015 |
| Publisher: Pan | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1447239345 | |
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It starts with a nightmare. Maggie Hungerford wakes out of one. Into another. She is awake, but this isn't her bed. This is the kind of place no-one should ever wake up.
DS Jane Benett has the kind of home life we now expect all of our fictional detectives to have: complicated. In her case, it is actually not as dysfunctional as most. Her main complication is her son Peter. He is her pride and joy, but he is also autistic, which brings with it a number of challenges, made worse by the fact that his father isn't around, has basically never been around, and Jane chooses to continue with her demanding career. Aside from that, she has the absolute love and support from her parents (though it might not always feel that way) that enable her to keep doing what she does.
Oh and she also slept with her boss once. Which is never a good idea.
Said boss, is currently somewhat off the rails by dint of his behaviour on a previous case. The fact that only sufficient allusions are made to it to get a feel for where he is now, without explaining the real how and why, suggests to me that the previous case in question was that in Donoghue's debut novel Never Look Back.
The cover and title of that book look extremely familiar, and Mike Lockyer feels familiar, but I can't remember the story nor find any record of having written about it… so I'm not sure what that's all about. I can say that you don’t need to have read it to enjoy 'No Place to Die.
For now, the Hungerford case has been assigned to DS Bennet and she is reporting up the chain, with instructions to keep Lockyer out of it. As if.
Meanwhile, a former colleague of the squad has gone missing. Leech had his own demons, unresolved murders, and his wife (an ex-copper herself, and a friend of both Lockyer and Bennett) knows he still had nightmares about one young girl in particular. His home looks like a scene of crime… blood stains, mostly wiped away inexpertly, but there's no motive, no other clues. And until there is, it looks like Maggie Hungerford's disappearance is going to have to take precedence.
Maggie is/was a psychology student. Brilliant, by all accounts. So focussed on her studies that she didn't really have time for serious boyfriends… or maybe had a habit of choosing the kind of boyfriends you have to not talk about…depending upon who you listened to. Two men are known to have been involved with her. Both shouldn't have been. Both admit it.
Both are linked to her studies and have psychological interests of their own that might just tie in. Or not. One of them is a definite 'weirdo' (if you'll excuse the technical expression) , the other is charm personified.
And because this is a genre novel both and neither of those things can be taken at face value.
And because it's a British crime novel you can expect the police to be equally brilliant and stupid. Hunches play a bigger role than one suspects they do in real life and the rules get more broken than is likely to happen (not for any overriding respect for process, but just because I suspect coppers these days have one eye on self-preservation and another on getting a conviction, which means the point of 'process' is finally sinking in).
That's not a criticism. PC Plod catching crooks by following due procedure might be effective, but it'll never be entertainment. We only need so much realism from our crime fiction.
To be fair the most unbelievable thing in the whole book has nothing to do with the police and detection. It's the notion that somewhere in Greenwich there is a University that looks like an Oxbridge college… and that seems to be absolutely legit: so what do I know? Check it out on the web if you don't believe me.
I'm not entirely sure that Leech's disappearance would take quite the back seat that it does in the book, but the investigation of missing Maggie and the paths that opens up rings true enough for the suspense to work. It's tightly plotted and kept to a timeline that might be unrealistic, but again, poetic license and no complaints.
If I've got a characterisation complaint it would be that we're seeing too much real-human-reaction-to-stress from our coppers. I'm not suggesting that I expect them to be superhuman, and vulnerability has a part to play, but I do wonder if the genre is moving too far the other way. I keep seeing female cops (in particular) who leave me thinking 'she'd never have got the job in the first place if she can't manage it better than that'. There is a touch of that about Bennett. Mostly, she's sorted, and I just feel that because of that she'd manage her un-sorted moments better than Donoghue lets her do.
Aside from that niggle, it's a good solid suspenseful mystery thriller, heightened by a few interspersed chapters from some-one who is clearly buried underground. Who, and when, is not disclosed which works brilliantly in stimulating a sufficiency of self-generated red herrings or clues which give the reader insights the detectives don't have.
Or not.
For a 'tricky second novel', this is a good one. We'll definitely see more of Ms Donoghue.
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