2015 police procedural mystery, fourth in the Fiona Griffiths
series. Stuck with logging evidence, Fiona asks for some cold cases to
look at, and is soon digging for details in her own distinctive style.
And this isn't a great place to start. While the first two books
were still settling into their genre, they include essential
information for setting up who Fi is and how she works. All right, you
wouldn't be entirely lost if this were your first book of the series,
but you'd miss a lot of interesting detail.
For all Fiona's mental oddities, it seems to me that much of the
structure of these books is about intuition. Specifically, Fi has it
and draws connections between things that seem not to be related, but
(because this is a police story more than it is a vigilante story) has
to gather actual evidence that can prove to the police, and then to a
jury, what the connections are and what's actually been going on. It
helps that while her moods are variable she never comes over as whiny.
On one hand, the author is clearly on Fi's side; not only is her
intuition pretty much always right, she has a bunch of utterly
reliable friends with specialised skills who will drop everything to
help her, as well as superiors who say things like
Fiona, I wouldn't give a flying fuck if you had battered the man to
death, then brought Jesus Christ and a retinue of his fucking angels
down from heaven to bring him back to life, so you could kill him
all over again. And I will, happily, put those sentiments on the
record any time the situation requires.
On the other hand, she certainly doesn't get things all her own way,
and she has a pretty rough time here; she's not by any means a
wish-fulfilment figure the way some protagonists turn out to be.
The climactic scenes turn out to have been the ones that originally
inspired the story to be built round them, often a good approach,
though I found myself slightly unconvinced on one point: if a certain
reversal of fortune, outside Fi's control, hadn't happened, there
would have been a whole lot less evidence available for the eventual
prosecution.
One might reasonably wonder why all these unusually-competent
criminals are operating in and around Cardiff, and there's a
suggestion of something like an overarching conspiracy which is
clearly a possible development for later in the series – and ties to
Fi's own background.
I'm continuing to enjoy this series, and I look forward to seeing how
it develops further. Recommended by Gus.
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