A Somewhat Abrasive
Hero ‘Fishing’ for the Insight That Will Break the Case
Murder in the Mind is the sixth book in what
is currently an eleven-book, British mystery series, each novel advertised as a
standalone work. This installment finds
the series protagonist, DI Skelgill, called to an isolated, high-security,
psychiatric hospital for a routine investigation. But soon, concerns about petty pilfering are forgotten
when inexplicable deaths and daring escapes enter the storyline. Over the course of the rest of the book,
Skelgill uses something akin to an abrasive, Socratic method to elicit thoughts
and theories from his team only to discount or disregard them in most cases. Eventually, however, he fits all of the
pieces into the puzzle, gaining his insight while fishing … which appears to be
a trademark for the series’ detective.
One
of the strengths of the book is the description of the setting, in this case,
the Lake District in northwest England.
As (bad) luck would have it, this story occurs during a rainy, dreary
stretch of weather and you can almost feel the drizzle seep under your collar
as you stand beside Skelgill on the banks of a lake. The story is a bit slow starting, but then
moves at a deliberate pace as the detective collects facts, then lets the
solution form in his mind. The murderer
is somewhat obvious, but twists in the details are still good.
There
were, however, a couple of aspects of the book that detracted. One was the writing style. Clearly, there is a thin line between clever
turns of a phrase and wording that is mind-numbing, but for me, this book
crossed over. Consider the description
of the hospital as “…an appellation that hints of
Bedlam (albeit an authentic eponym – being built on the lower slopes of Hare’s
Fell) and an outward appearance that is at once foreboding and forbidding.” I could almost understand this type of wording
if it reflected the protagonist’s speech, but Skelgill tends toward simple
statements replete with British slang (although he can be obscure). A second concern was point of view. It is third person consistently, but
sometimes the narrator knew what Skelgill was thinking and other times, he/she
did not. Whether or not we got a peek
into the detective’s thoughts seemed random and so, became a bit distracting.
Overall,
consistent use of point of view and more straightforward prose would have
helped this otherwise prototypical British murder mystery.
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