Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)! If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here.
Review
Set in a bitter winter, an otherwise scenic town holds some terrible secrets.
Writer Alex Kelly – struggling both with the mistakes of her last true crime investigation and book, and the death of her partner – is offered a steady wage to ghost-write the story of Coram House. Her client, a lawyer involved in a legal case against the church about the abuse of children at Coram House when it was an orphanage, is commanding and secretive, setting Alex on an investigative course where she cannot know who to trust. When Alex finds a woman dead in the woods around Coram House, she begins to fall into conspiracy theories that raise questions about her own conduct by the police.
The setting and themes are well chosen, atmospheric, and believable, and the interweaving of research materials with the narrative itself makes for an engaging structure. To my mind, the tech billionaire type who asks Alex for a date and provides her what may (or may not) be valuable clues in her unofficial investigation is the only off-key note in an otherwise excellent and complex symphony of characters, each contending with their own half-buried misery and small-town grievances. I think this is a commentary on wealthy outsiders and their transformation of small towns’ character, but it’s a distraction from the main plot and felt a little bit like unnecessary comic relief.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this novel and would love to see its main character appear again. True-crime authors/podcasters make for really fun investigators, helping to avoid some of the artificiality that often comes with having to establish an unofficial detective in these sorts of stories. The tension with the police and the official detectives is something I always really enjoy.
See also
These lists capture other detective/crime stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- True Detective: Night Country (TV series)
- Wind River (film)
- Doubt (film)
- Only Murders in the Building (TV series)
Read my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies now (in paperback, hardback, or on Kindle)!
Dominique Gracia 
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