20 police-adjacent mystery, tartan noir, first in the Heather Filson
series. Heather was a hard charger in the police, but messed up. Now
she's just marking time with one-night stands and heavy drinking. But
she still tries to be a good cop.
It takes a certain amount of time to get her moving, though; she
gets dragged into the latest missing girl because it turns out her
grandfather is a notorious criminal who can effectively lean on the
police to take it seriously. But as so often in tartan noir Heather
messes up repeatedly, to the point of arranging a break-in to do an
illicit search of a suspect's house, and it's not surprising she's
taken off the case. Particularly since there are a couple of pieces of
evidence suggesting that a serial killer from decades ago, with whom
Heather has a connection, may have started up again…
(Yes, Kirk's doing that annoying thing where the protagonist knows
something but it's kept a secret from the reader. This irks me. But I
persisted with the book anyway. It's not even much of a secret; the
title is the main clue.)
At which point, of course, Heather can't leave it alone, and gathers
information from the sources that are still available to her—a
pathologist who if not an old friend at least understands her
obsessions, and an autistic-coded schoolgirl who's a true-crime
podcaster n her spare time.
The second half of this book is Heather's mostly solo investigation,
but written in the style of a police procedural, which all the way
back to Ed McBain is innately a team story. That conflict weakens
it, and Heather frankly isn't all that interesting in herself.
Heather's father is suffering from dementia, and these sections are
just hard work to read. Yeah, I know people try to keep people they
love with them, even when they can't safely be left unsupervised. But
I don't much want to read about it.
One very positive point, though, was the portrayal of the killer's
whining self-justification, which seemed very real and at the same
time managed to be interesting in its own right, rather than just
because it's a portrayal of a nasty person.
There's less humour than I expect from tartan noir but overall I
enjoyed this, and I'll seek out some of Kirk's other works.