Death in a Lonely Place (Harper) is British author-editor Stig Abell’s follow-up to his most enjoyable and engaging debut novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Readers would do well to tackle this developing series in the order of publication, but it’s not essential.
The original cast is back: Jake Jackson, the young but burnt-out London cop who’s inherited a compound in a lovely rural countryside from his late uncle Arthur;
his lover, Livia Bennett, the area’s veterinarian and single mother of pre-adolescent Diana; Inspector Gerald Watson, the local law; and “Rose,” a petty criminal whom Jake has unexpectedly befriended (and who will play a significant role in the story’s action).Also worth noting: this is some compound Jake owns! It includes a huge store of food, thousands of crime novels, a wine cellar, and most helpfully, a large bag of weed. The main house is “set in countless acres of land … a soft pastel expanse of peace, a world entire of tumbling fields and ancient hedges and deep loamy soil.”
But Abell’s sophomore effort occasionally stumbles (as so many second novels do) because he overstuffs his story, and it ultimately feels somewhat less plausible than Little Sky.
That’s not to say there isn’t much to savor here. Some of Abell’s strongest writing comes in his descriptions of the natural world surrounding his mini-estate.
On an early evening walk, “daylight is already slipping away, the mottled greys of the heavy sky bleeding imperceptibly into black. As ever, he basks in the quiet: the breeze lingering in the reeds, the frisky scattering of leaves, the relentless slip-slap of the water on the bank.”
It's a beautiful, small, and isolated village, our Caelum Parvum—Latin for Little Heaven. As Jake leaves for a quick trip to London, “the sky has the pallor of winter, the colours muted like watered-down paint, washed-out umbers and ochres.”
In the first chapter Watson (“long and thin as a poker”) arrives at Jake’s house to ask him about the very recent disappearance of a little local girl, and a clue that simply says, “NO TABOO.” Watson and Jake have both a friendship and a collegial relationship.
For a former cold-case detective like Jake, who encountered the “NO TABOO” assertion in a past child abduction, saying no to helping Watson is impossible. Although he wants to be free of the bonds of investigations, violence, and criminals in general, it’s difficult for Jake to let go of the allure of solving a case, and he again lets himself surrender to that very pull. This set-up, however, feels hurried and contrived, just a way to get the plot rolling.
Two new characters join Abell’s series cast in these pages. The first is Aletheia Campbell, a police officer who can dig deeply into warrens of hard-to-access data, and was Jake’s “searcher” when he was a cop. Also on board is a friend of Aletheia’s, a mystery writer named Martha Kline. A former “security service” officer who is legless after being shot several times in the field, Kline has a brilliant mind with an almost unbelievable ability to make things happen, extra-legal and otherwise.
Aletheia tells Jake that her quest for further information about “NO TABOO” has rattled a few cages farther up the police food chain. “I’m not entirely sure how it works,” she remarks. “But I reckon it is a thing, a well-protected, well-financed thing that looms in the background, that I’ve never even got close to fully identifying. I’ve been pursuing it off the books since you left, nagging at it, and I now know enough to be very wary indeed.”
Meanwhile, Jake struggles to straddle a line he knows Livia does not want him crossing. With her daughter and their quiet rural surroundings, and now with Jake in the picture, Livia feels her life is complete. She seeks to pull Jake in one direction—stop being a cop—as he veers toward another, finding it hard to give up crime-solving. Only eventually does Jake come clean to her about his increasing involvement with Watson’s case. Livia is understandably relieved, then, when the missing child is recovered safely. But things seem a bit pat, and sure enough, it turns out to be a false climax, because “NO TABOO” soon rises to the surface once more.
Livia is hired to take care of horses belonging to the district’s rich, clearly corrupt, yet powerful autocrat, Sam Martinson, a former newspaper publishing titan and now the squire of an estate he has dubbed Purple Prose. He’s another one of those upper-class, sociopathic manipulators who are all too familiar (bordering on clichéd) to readers of English crime novels.
Martinson and his creepy henchmen, or “assistants,” seem likely to have some involvement with “NO TABOO,” which we finally learn is a mysterious “service” that can get one anything, if the price is met.
Behind the scenes, Aletheia and Martha are digging up the details of Martinson’s background. At the same time, a dishonorable former prison guard from Jake’s past reappears. Is he involved with “NO TABOO”? Why, yes!
By this point, were it not for Abel’s frequently gorgeous prose, we would have the disappointing sense of having read such a story before. In more ways than one: Jake and Livia do the same dance as in the previous book—hot sex, arguments about Jake getting back into policing, break up, make up. And our primary villain, Martinson, is a retread variation on the cloistered criminal family from Little Sky; he just has more money.
Abell does a skillful job of keeping the pages turning. A lengthy section set at Martinson’s huge estate, with an amusing group of weekend guests that includes Jake and Livia, is solidly conceived, and Rose has the best one-liners. It must be mentioned, though, that when two people act utterly out of character in the exciting dénouement, the credibility of this story suffers.
Martha’s near-omnipotent ability to make things happen also feels a bit too convenient. The action is exciting—a fight scene involving razor blades truly pops (and bleeds), but the excitement is undermined by Abell’s apparent desire to pile on the twists, the weakest of which is the motivation for evil by a key malefactor.
We’re left with an engaging tale, expertly conveyed local ambiance, some vibrantly drawn players, and the superbly delineated natural world surrounding Jake’s existence, but also with a feeling that the author tried a little too hard to outdo his debut—the kitchen sink is all that’s missing.
Those caveats aside, one can do much worse than Death in a Lonely Place when looking for a classic English country mystery. No doubt Abell will be back with a third installment in his series—and so will this reader, eager to devour it.
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