Fawley’s team are called to a shooting at an isolated house outside Oxford. Quite soon, anomalies begin to appear in the story told by the two elderly occupants and links emerge to a sensational crime of fifteen years earlier which cast doubt on the conviction. The investigation which follows becomes gripping as the team slowly close in on the truth, but Cara Hunter makes it refreshingly unsensational and avoids cheap Shocking Twists.
There is plenty of very familiar stuff here – the re-investigation of a very high-profile crime and conviction, huge press interest and so on – but Hunter handles it well and manages to make it feel quite fresh. She structures the narrative with a number of points of view, transcripts from police interviews and TV programmes, newspaper articles etc., which in other hands can sometime be very wearing but here I found it very effective. The one thing that grates slightly is Fawley’s first-person contributions among the other third-person sections, but it’s a very minor gripe.
One of Hunter’s best achievements is her creation and development of the police team. They are a varied, wholly believable bunch in whose lives I have become quite invested. Fawley himself is actually rather a bland protagonist, but I find I like that as a welcome change from the overblown, melodramatic Complicated Personal Lives of so many fictional detectives. The characters add to the story rather than distract from it, which is a cause for celebration.
This has been a slightly variable series so far, but this is an enjoyable and involving instalment which I can recommend.
(My thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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