Darkness Falls by
Margaret Murphy
A good British thriller, of the 'psychological' variety, from an author who
has established a reputation with five previous novels of this type. Written
wholly from the police procedural perspective, it is sited in Chester,
continuing the modern trend to take crime fiction away from the traditional
locale of London, the Home Counties and East Anglia to well north of
Watford Gap.
A prominent woman barrister is abducted one morning and ignominiously
chained to the wall of a dank and dark cellar, while another abductee's
corpse is recovered from the River Dee. The story alternates between the
police's strenuous efforts to find the missing woman and the dialogue
between the abductor and prisoner. The lawyer was due to prosecute a
Mafia-style drug baron that week and he manages to strike a deal with the
police for bail in return for inside information from his gang about her
whereabouts. Much of the action revolves around the character of the
investigators, with both goodies and baddies in the ranks of detective-
constables, but all of it is believable and the police procedure accurate.
As always, reviewers of whodunits are hamstrung by the necessity of
preserving the integrity of the plot, so suffice to say that it works out in the
end, with a twist in the story which is surprising, though a long way from
being a cheat.
An excellent standard of writing, though few books published these days are
poor in this respect - the cut-throat competition for publishers' contracts
ensures that sloppy work is as almost extinct as the dodo.
This is a mature, well-informed novel, certainly with the 'can't-put-down'
label, displaying the promised insight into the fears, hates and obsessions of
both abductor and victim. It is no reflection at all on this particular book to
wonder why there is so much 'dark' fiction these days, squeezing every drop
of blackness from the human character to provide our reading entertainment.
Though the 'cosies', Poirot and the village locked-library yarns may now be
looked on rather pityingly as old-fashioned pap, they did not generate the
pessimism about the evil in the human animal as does the plethora of
depressing books that seem to have burgeoned since Fred West, Peter
Sutcliffe, Dennis Neilsen and all the other monsters in our society.
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