A Son of the Rock

Constable, 2013, 394 p. First published 2007.

There is a certain sameness to modern crime fiction; which is to say modern detective fiction. Gone are the days of the gentleman sleuth such as Poirot or Wimsey, and the even more gentle woman, Miss Marple, solving crimes almost at leisure and in relatively salubrious surroundings. Now we have the hard-bitten, hardened police detective dealing with contemporary (well, in this case twelve years old) psychopathic criminality in all its grisly detail.

I would not normally have read this but it is set almost exclusively in Fife, where I live, (with such familiar locations as Boarhills, Kingsbarns, Crail and St Andrews,) and was recommended by our nearest local librarian as an introduction to the author prior to his visit to the library this November. Suitably enough it was published by Constable.

The short Chapter One features a young woman fleeing from a brutal captivity along a Fife coastal path on a freezing night. That is the last time we are given her point of view. It is her body DCI Andy Gilchrist, a widower, and his new DS Jessica (Jessie) Janes, are called to investigate a few days later, dead from a blow to the head, possibly after a fall from the path, and subsequent exposure. They trace her back to a cottage in Kingsbarns where they find two more young women dead, decapitated, and evidence of enslavement into prostitution.

Janes has a sideline in stand-up comedy which she undertakes to try out jokes written by her deaf son, Robert. Her mother has a criminal record but is a constant thorn in her side trying to gain legal access to Robert.  Gilchrist and the forensic pathologist Dr Rebecca Cooper have a mutual attraction complicated by the fact that she is married to someone else (albeit not happily). One of the other female detectives has a problematic relationship with a man who turns out to be unknowingly involved in the case, another has a booze problem.

I thought Janes’s background as teased out by Gilchrist in their conversations and his investigations into her mother’s origins would have made it unlikely for her ever to have been accepted into the police but maybe their standards aren’t too high these days.

This is pretty much the standard police procedural offering but some of the details were perhaps unnecessarily gruesome (of course this may be what the crime fiction market now demands) and there was a cliffhanger scene which stretched credulity by being kept going too long.

On putting this book onto my Library Thing account I found this was actually DC Gilchrist’s fourth appearance in print. I may try one more to confirm my thoughts that it’s not really my thing.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Acknowledgements “whne” (when.) Otherwise; “change in tack” (x 3, the phrase is usually ‘change of tack’,) “chaffed and reddened by a cold Scottish wind” (chafed and reddened,) “all was not as it seemed” (not all was as it seemed,) “oblivious of his presence” (it’s ‘oblivious to’ not ‘oblivious of’,) “as his drove on” (as he drove on,) “the Kingsbarns’ killings” (Kingsbarns here is adjectival, not possessive; ‘the Kingsbarns killings’,) two police acronyms used and immediately explained within two lines (both could have been avoided or worked around without loss of clarity,) “not to help him breath” (help him breathe,) facia (fascia,) “and looked at Gilchrist’s way” (and looked Gilchrist’s way,) “seemed to be order of the day” (to be the order of the day) “toodle-do” (the formulation is usually ‘toodle-oo’.)