RogerBW's Blog

The One That Got Away, J D Kirk 02 May 2025

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.

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