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DC Maeve Kerrigan, who first appeared in Jane Casey's well-received debut THE BURNING, is back on the job, recovered from the serious injury she suffered in her earlier case. She may be physically mended, but she is not sure she can cope with the job, or to be more precise, with the new DI, Josh Derwent, who seems determined to keep Maeve in her place, and that place is secondary indeed. Derwent is smug, full of himself, and convinced that women police are naturally inferior to their male colleagues. Luckily, she still has her marvellous boss, the appropriately named Superintendent Godley, to rely on. The case she is on with Derwent is a nasty one. Initially, they are confronted by two deaths that bear considerable similarities to each other. Two men have been found dead, each hideously tortured. Both of them had convictions as sex offenders, one for possession of child pornography, the other for raping two young girls. Both are on the sex-offenders register and both denied their guilt even after sentencing. Derwent is cheerfully optimistic about the case. After all, it will be a plus for his career if he solves it, but if he fails, who cares what happens to men like these? In short order, yet another man is found murdered, this time an eighty-year-old priest who readily confessed to inappropriate behaviour as he had to admit that he did take a degree of pleasure in seeing the boys in his youth club take showers. No one, including the judge, seemed to feel that he was especially guilty so he did no time, but still his name was in the register. At this point, repelled though she may be at the very idea of sexual offences against minors, Maeve is beginning to feel a certain measure of empathy for these men who have been so horribly treated before and after they were killed. Perhaps it is this that makes her notice that, although similar, these men do not seem to have died at the hands of a single serial killer. It certainly makes her persist when paying a warning visit to a likely fourth victim who fails to answer her knock. Her persistence pays off and his life is saved. At this point, the investigation takes a whole new and quite interesting direction. THE RECKONING is a difficult book to characterize. On the one hand, it is a sound police procedural with a convincing protagonist in Maeve, neither wonder woman nor sweetly feminine side-kick. On the other hand, it lurches alarmingly into romance territory every time hunky detective Rob enters the scene and Casey pursues the classic romantic plot of attraction, followed by misunderstanding,reconciliation, hug-and-kisses. Structurally, the book has its weaknesses as well. For more than three-quarters of the way, it is told in Maeve's voice. Then, abruptly, the font becomes bigger, bolder and darker, and Rob gets to do a bit of narration of his own, though why Casey felt the shift was necessary remains unclear. Whereas Maeve's voice is thoroughly convincing, Rob's is not. It is true that he introduces a sub-plot about which Maeve could have no knowledge, but it is neither an interesting nor necessary complication. There is so much to like about THE RECKONING that I hesitate to raise these objections and perhaps other readers will find less to bother them than I. Still, a little discipline or some stern editing might have produced an extraordinary book. As it is, it only comes close. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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