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.
We’re in the Orkney Islands now, in the digital age with windmills and smart phones and Neolithic stones, one of which is involved in the death of a prominent islander.
Archie Stout had been a farmer, fisherman and businessman. He’d had a vicious temper and a fondness for women and whisky. In a classless society where everyone is related one way or another he had not walked lightly. While alive his sexual exploits may have been overlooked (except by his wife), dead, they carried weight, but not much. Although there was talk of an affair with a seductive incomer, there was more substance in the rumour that he was at odds with the incumbents at the hotel in which he was said to have a major share. But sex and even business problems paled before Archie’s prime concern which was shared in differing degrees by the whole community: currently there was a threat to the future of the islands’ precious Neolithic stones.
They had been discovered and researched by Archie’s father, an amateur historian, but they had been filmed and promoted by an English professor, a famed TV pundit, who had appropriated them as his own personal trophies, basking in their uniqueness and the kudos of being their sole presenter and, by implication, their discoverer. Generally speaking the islanders hadn’t much time for the man, only Archie, the self-appointed guardian of the stones with his family honour at stake, felt himself viscerally involved. Someone was said to be writing a book which could be a joke or an exposé; either way it could question the authenticity of the academic research; careers were at stake, heads could roll. When, just before Christmas, the professor and his elegant wife came to stay at the hotel the atmosphere was phrenetic. And then Archie was found at the Neolithic dig, killed by one of the iconic stones.
The police were faced with a wealth of suspects and the Force officially numbered three: a DI and two uniformed sergeants. This swelled to four with the arrival of Willow, Perez’s partner, also a DI. She came on Christmas leave with their small son and was a welcome addition to the tiny team. There were no Forensics available, no pathologist, and any reinforcements were grounded on the mainland, Scotland being shrouded in fog.
The investigation became a series of interviews conducted in kitchens and bars and one decrepit drawing room for, with a second murder, attention moved to Kirkwall, the island capital, and to the grammar school, the link being the history master, a gay Englishman, a popular teacher and author of the proposed book on what were now known as the killing stones.
The stones were the unifying theme throughout this novel, and everyone connected with them carried a secret that formed a sub-plot, each story subtly but not obviously revealed in slow talk where witnesses turned suspects, and all became informants. Dialogue was as unsophisticated, as repetitive and confusing as the speakers, a jig saw collection of convoluted gossip that the four cops attempted to unscramble every night. There was an awareness of a crescendo in the making but no indication of a seething cauldron below the surface which Cleeves held in reserve; only a point emphasised here and there with a word or a phrase, hardly a clue, merely a nudge, a suggestion of something other waiting in the wings,
Although the denouement had at least one reader contemplating Bunyan’s slough of Despond The Killing Stones works; with its exotic setting, disparate cast of characters, the lure of Grand Guignol and a high body count it’s as topical as they come.
