It was just before Christmas when Melanie Muncy went missing from an isolated Yorkshire hamlet in a particularly harsh winter. DI Jim Brindle from the elite detective unit, Cold Storage, was sent to investigate and he could have been helped by Roddy Mace, a local journalist. Only Brindle, the obsessive compulsive, teetotal, vegetarian loner wants nothing to do with the writer. Mace is desperate to revive his flagging career. Well it's more than flagging: he left London in disgrace, so it's the two men living on the outskirts of life who are trying independently to trap the man they believe is responsible for Melanie's disappearance and that man is Steven Rutter, another loner, near destitute and living high on the moors, who knows all the hiding places. He knows the secrets of the local town too and there are those who fear that he might tell more than should be known.
| Turning Blue by Benjamin Myers | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: In the depths of a harsh winter up on the Yorkshire moors a teenager is missing, but the remote hamlet where she lives hides a multitude of secrets. Recommended. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 336 | Date: August 2016 |
| Publisher: Moth Publishing | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1911356004 | |
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There are some very picturesque places in Yorkshire and then there are the gaps in between. Turning Blue is set in one of the gaps. It's working Yorkshire where communities are held together as much by their secrets as by their common aims. The men, including Roy Pinder, head of the local police, all went to school together and they have their fingers in the same pies, some more legal than others, some decidedly illegal. There's even a local TV celebrity, Larry Lister, who has some deviant sexual tastes.
All you need to know to understand Jim Brindle is that when he was asked if he was a glass half full or a glass half empty person, he said that he would have to see the glass before he could answer. He's got a very obvious birthmark which has done nothing for his social skills and sometimes it's difficult to see why he has the reputation for being such a great detective. He might have a brain the size of a planet, but he has no real ability to get people to talk to him. Mace, on the other hand is good at getting people to talk and he has the instincts of an investigator. The two men make a good pairing, if Brindle could just accept it.
It's Steven Rutter who fascinates though: child of the local prostitute who abused him throughout his childhood and then tied up the family farm so that Rutter couldn't sell it until he was fifty. He's still a decade short of freedom and in the meantime he lives in squalor and his loss of the sense of smell in a childhood accident is perhaps a blessing to him - but not to the people who encounter him. They might laugh at Rutter, the local pig man, but they're more than willing to use him for the dirty work. Pigs are known to eat anything. Well, except teeth.
Turning Blue is rather like an RTA - you know it's best not to look, but you've got to know what's happened. I thought I might struggle to come to terms with the writing - the occasional stream-of-consciousness sentences, the lack of quotation marks, but within a matter of pages I was completely drawn in, unable to turn away. This is the first Benjamin Myers I've read, but it won't be the last and I rather hope that I might hear more of Brindle and Mace.
I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of the book to the Bookbag.
The go-to writer for Yorkshire crime is probably Peter Robinson but we also have a lot of respect for David Mark. Moth publishing aims to present the best in crime fiction from the north of England: we've been impressed by To Catch a Rabbit by Helen Cadbury and Stolen by Rebecca Muddiman.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Turning Blue by Benjamin Myers at Amazon.com.
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