First published 2019. SilverWood Books paperback, 2019, pp 340, c.115,000 words.
This is a modern murder mystery story, somewhere between Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels and ITV’s Midsomer Murders. It features a police detective, John Lincoln; a disaffected loner with a lot in common with John Rebus. Both are middle aged and have a troubled relationships with alcohol, their bosses and women. The setting here is Wiltshire, a thinly disguised Salisbury, rather than Rebus’s Edinburgh, and the focus is more on Midsomer-ish small-town and rural, middle England rather than gritty, city, Scotland. Copleston evokes her setting well and the many characters are all inside the bounds of plausibility.
A woman is murdered, found in a public toilet. She is a respectable business woman, well regarded in the community, and who has been married for a few years to an older man who runs an antiquarian bookshop. Motive is not apparent, and likely suspects have good alibies. Several potentially helpful people have suddenly gone abroad. Lincoln and his team start digging. Nothing seems to come together. This slow reveal is well handled: dribbled out at such a pace as to maintain suspense and keep the reader hooked. There are some clever, unexpected twists. Questions are left dangling: why didn’t the nice and sensible Meg go to the police when she found that out [p149]? One or two baddies are apparent early on, but not how they fit with the crime.
While Lincoln is the main police detective, his point of view is a minority of the content. There is some police procedure, but that is not the main focus – it is not being steeped in police lore. The story is told from many of the characters’ points-of-view; switches being signalled by chapter breaks. Some are short, no more than a page, and in total there are sixty-nine chapters. This is a little dizzying, but the switches are handled admirably well. While we get to see the bigger picture, the whole jigsaw image is still slow to emerge.
Lincoln, like Rebus, is hard to like, even if he is an effective detective. He is rather prone to use his physical strength to coerce, even with the woman he fancies. What she sees in him, I can’t imagine. But unlike Rebus, Lincoln has middle-class ambitions: restoring an old vicarage perhaps? Rather implausible as he works all hours, his job is not well paid and is under threat anyway.
The long list of characters and suspects include a number from a stock stable of corrupt local politicians, dodgy businessmen and public school-types. Usually the rich are bad, as can those at the bottom. The petty, low-life criminals offset the good taste displayed elsewhere. All are believably human.
The writing is fluid, and there are some nice lines like ‘an instance of bad timing’ [p172] which would make a good title for this type of book. On a few occasions the reader is told background details, e.g. on Lincoln [p94] and on another important character [p111], but these did not seem excessively intrusive or manipulative. There was an extra ‘with’ typo [p272], and a character misremembers something said earlier, reversing the important order [p310 v p249]. There are some lovely little passages in the writing, e.g. Lincoln remembering the early days with his former wife [p312].
Overall this is a well written and entertaining read. There may not be a lot here that is truly original, but the story is told so well that the pages keep needing to be turned.
P.S. This is printed in the annoyingly large American paperback format – annoying because it has to go spine-up rather than spine-out on my bookcase.
Biography of Copleston from her own website: https://nikkicopleston.com/about/
Biography of Copleston from her publisher: https://www.silverwoodbooks.co.uk/nikki-copleston
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49235756-the-price-of-silence-di-jeff-lincoln?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_39
© William John Graham, April 2024