The Sound Of Her Voice

Written by Nathan Blackwell

Review written by Gwen Moffat

Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.


The Sound Of Her Voice
Orion
RRP: £8.99
Released: November 28, 2019
Pbk

Auckland, New Zealand 1995, and the protagonist, Matt Buchanan, then a rookie cop, introduces his story explosively with the shooting dead of his friend and colleague and the wounding of her partner.

Sixteen years later, now a seasoned detective, Matt’s seen it all but retains his humanity, dealing kindly with a rape victim and her bewildered parents. And he’s deeply affected when the disintegrating body of another girl is found in a sack in a mangrove swamp: a horrifying reminder of one who went missing on her way to school twelve years ago: one of Matt’s cases but never solved. A child killer is walking free.

This book presents as a police procedural with varied cases running concurrently: rape, homicide, trafficking, paedophilia, but shortly it resolves itself into one ramified case, one plot comprising a number of crimes involving missing girls. Running parallel is the wholesale manufacture of drugs where, curiously, there is no evidence of wealth. It would seem that profits are ploughed back into the business or used merely as the means for concerned individuals to indulge their own crazy forms of depravity.

There is a naïveté about the novel. Written by a retired cop in gutter speak with all its limited vocabulary it strives for sophisticated porn but is curiously reminiscent of teenage smut. Technically the detail is good: in the working of cases in a different country, in the manufacture of drugs. And there’s a nice turn to the plot where, after a particularly bloody shoot-out, Matt leaves the police and, counselled only by a good priest, takes a job as a flying instructor.

Then, after the discovery of another girl’s body and the belated suspicion that a serial killer has been at large since his unsolved case of years ago, Matt’s lured back to a force in dire need of a steady hand with vast experience. But events and human nature conspire; Matt is strong meat and now, answerable to no one other than his demons, he follows his own course and all hell breaks loose, leading to an extraordinary climax.

Matt Buchanan is no Roderick Alleyn despite the book’s being shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Award but bright boys will revel in it.



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