I have just read Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe.
I loved Staincliffe’s Sal Kilkenny from her very first outing – reminiscent of Val McDiarmid’s Kate Brannigan, a young woman private investigator, Manchester background, but added struggles coping with family & motherhood. Highly satisfactory reads.
But then came the disappointment of her Blue Murder novel – a novelisation of the tv series in which Caroline Quentin played DCI Janine Lewis whose struggles domestic & with an aggressively macho atmosphere of her job were drawn in an oversimplified, cartoony, shouty way.
Dead To Me is stickered as a prequel to another tv series Scott & Bailey & was written by agreement with Sally Wainwright, the TV series writer, and co-creator Diane Taylor, who is a retired Detective Inspector from the Greater Manchester Police Force’s Major Incident Team.
It presents a much more subtle & satisfying portrait of the work of three highly professional women officers in the murder squad, realistic about the true nature of police work & procedures, & the struggle to fit this around three contrasting sets of domestic/family situations.
TImely too, dealing as it does with the gut- & heart-wrenching lives of the ‘underclass’, in particular of three young girls only recently sent out to live independent lives having spent long years in care.
Staincliffe manages to convey the desperation of these lives, & the horror of murder & rape, without the need to show off her technical skills as a writer by describing the attacks themselves in loving detail, or indulging in post mortem porn, but by deftly describing the state of their houses or flats, & their emotional yearnings.
There was one gut-wrenching shock which made me close both the book & my eyes for several moments, & near the end I was actually crying – something which no book has managed to do for a long time.
Which is not to say that it was not a seriously good read
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