Natural Causes - James Oswald
As a newly-minted Detective Inspector, Tony McLean tends to get the leavings in the homicide department, a tendency made worse by a poor relationship with the department's top cop, "Dagwood." That's probably why he's been handed a case so cold it's glacial; the mummified, mutilated body of a young girl decades past its sell-by date. Edinburgh is in the middle of a crime spree, however, and Tony somehow keeps stumbling over the latest victims. They are of a type: elderly men, socially prominent and wealthy. That's the crowd his grandmother ran with in her youth. Poor Gran, in a coma after her stroke more than a year ago...
Although the grisly murder count of prominent octogenarians mounts, McLean is drawn to the mysterious young girl who died so horrible a death. There is something strangely… evil about the circumstances. Even as his caseload mounts and his calendar fills, his personal life spins out of control with the death of his grandmother - and his inheritance of her substantial estate.
Undeterred by good fortune and his increasing unease about a crime spree that seems to spiral about him, McLean delves into the circumstances of the mystery girl's death. What he will learn could change his life…
| Your correspondent is a voracious reader of crime fiction who gave up on buying books several years ago, back when the contents of his library threatened to tilt the house ever so slightly to the northeast. I must admit that I prefer modern mysteries set in the USA, though I will occasionally venture out of that comfort zone if something looks promising - and James Oswald's Natural Causes marks my most recent foray into the wilds of the crime fiction landscape beyond these shores. First-time mystery writer James Oswald sets Natural Causes in his native Scotland, in the process making rainy Edinburgh a character unto itself. Already a published author of fantasy, Oswald manages the shift to a real-world setting (for the most part, anyway) with elan. McLean and his mates are well-crafted characters with whom a reader quickly connects, and with whom the reader sympathetically observes the politics of the squadroom and the exasperation of watching incompetence among the leaders. |
McLean comes with a backstory, only partially fleshed-out for Natural Causes: orphaned as a child, he was reared by his grandmother. Tragedy struck again in his twenties, when his wife died (cause unspoken). Now thirty-something, he leads a quiet, solitary life - all of which will change with the death of his grandmother.
 |
| Central Edinburgh (David.Monniaux / wikimedia commons) |
For the most part Oswald does a workmanlike job on this police procedural, with a nod to the tedium of the ordinary legwork upon which most investigations turn. His characters show the flashes of insight fans of the genre have come to expect, and the resolutions of small "side" cases are well-written. There's more than a smattering of humor, and even a little romance (though nothing graphic).
On the other hand, the structure of the novel in its totality is somewhat lacking, depending heavily on coincidence and - even worse - on dragging in an unnecessary element of the supernatural (though happily, neither vampires nor zombies appear). The use of the hackneyed "all this happened because the evil one targeted you" trope to explain the many coincidences is, in a word, lazy. And Oswald's broad hints about McLean's ancestry are just too transparent for words.
In all, Natural Causes is a well-crafted police procedural that has been, unfortunately, tainted by the author's apparent desire to pander to adherents to VampRom. More's the pity: McLean and his world are both more than enough to keep a reader interested even without the supernatural window dressing.
No comments:
Post a Comment