Tangled Web UK Review December 2000
Grave Concerns by
Rebecca Tope
hbk out November 00
Published by Piatkus
at £17.99
If ever a book got off to a cracking start it is Grave Concerns by Rebecca Tope. In a masterly piece of descriptive writing she describes a train juddering to halt, (leaves on the line?) one night, somewhere between Taunton and Exeter.
The jolt wakes up passenger Caroline Kennett who finds that the carriage lights have gone out – but she can still pick out two shadowy figures in a field alongside the track. What are they doing? Is it a spade one is holding? Is it a hole they have dug? And is it a body she can see lying on the ground? She may never know, because at that moment the rain starts up and she is on her way. It is inevitable that the story becomes more pedestrian, after that, though it does wend its way to a satisfying conclusion.
Drew Slocombe, who fancies himself as an amateur detective, is starting up an ecologically friendly burial ground. (Don’t plant them too deep and the bodies will fertilise the soil!). His problems of trying to get a new business of this nature off the ground is not helped by having to take charge of his young daughter during working hours. Things take a turn for the worse when the body of an elderly woman is found buried in his Peaceful Repose Cemetery before he has even opened for business.
Who put her there? Was she related to a Genevieve Slater, a woman who holds an illicit fascination for Drew? Who is putting the remains of dead animals around the cemetery field? How long will a body last in Drew’s storage room before it starts going off? These are just a few of the questions that Grave Concerns answers.
Before she settled down to writing and publishing, the author worked as an antenatal instructor, a relationship counsellor and an undertaker’s assistant. The experience she gained in all of these jobs is put to good use in this book.
It is well worth reading – though you may find yourself agreeing with Drew’s wife, Karen, when she explodes: “Oh, you! You’re to good to be true, aren’t you? Birth, death they all come so easily to you. All in a day’s work. You’re sickening sometimes.”
Talking of sickening – you may find out a little more about decomposing bodies and an unexpected birth than you would expect from a detective story.
(
Roy Stringer
)
