During a particularly cold January in the Fens, a car is found
in a frozen river with a body inside. Not long afterwards,
another body is found in rather more bizarre circumstances
– set on a gargoyle high up on Ely Cathedral. The first
body is recent; the second possibly dates from 1966. Back
in that year, while millions watched and listened to the winning
world cup match, there was a robbery at a local garage that
went disastrously wrong. Could the two bodies be linked to
that? Local reporter Philip Dryden is on the case and possibly
finding links to his own life-shattering experience two years
earlier…
This novel was written back in 2003 and parts
of it already make it seem quite historical, showing how things
have changed since then (particularly related to technology).
It is the first in the series and introduces us to the melancholy
Dryden, a former top Fleet Street reporter who has taken a
job on the tiny local paper, The Crow, to be near his wife.
She is in hospital in a coma following an accident, and the
area is where Dryden grew up.
For
me the best feature of the novel was the author’s wonderfully
tangible descriptions of the Fens, an eerie drowned landscape
like no other. Wrapped in an icy winter and struggling with
rising water levels, it provides the perfect backdrop to a
convoluted tale of old sins casting long shadows, cold cases
gone unpunished and a tangle of intertwined stories. Apart
from the landscape, the other theme running through the book
is how virtually everybody -- apart from the protagonist --
is hopeless at their job, a darkly comic thread at times,
but which also seems a bit forced. Dryden is a moody loner
who has a low opinion of just about everybody, a modern Fenland
equivalent of a ‘40s gumshoe. I didn’t find myself
warming to him, and his elephantine taxi driver sidekick,
Humph, never becomes more than a list of quirks. However,
the story and setting alone make it a rather impressive series
debut, so I would read another and can see why it has been
reprinted. Worth a look.
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