Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
When an aged widower dies of natural causes and his frail 90-year-old girlfriend insists that she murdered him the immediate reaction would be that she’s showing off, is deluded, or just plain daft – except that she contacts the local cop shop to maintain that in the previous seven decades she has wasted five other men, mostly husbands.
Thus Daphne St Clair declares herself the latest in the infamous catalogue of serial killers. The police find credible evidence of her claims and she is held in her care home (the Coconut Grove Senior Living Facility) until provision can be found in some Florida jail to accommodate a dangerous and disabled nonagenarian prior to trial. Meanwhile she is an embarrassment at the home: a target for stalkers and reporters, but an instant icon for the public who adore her; there are Daphne T-shirts, wine glasses, cooking aprons. She decides to start a podcast and, after interviewing a number of avid applicants, chooses a hungry young journalist looking for her first big scoop.
Ruth Robinson is shy, gauche, initially timid but basically with the nose and bite of a Jack Russell. The project goes ahead and confessed killer and reporter snap and snarl through the ensuing interviews, recordings, and bitchy confrontations as Daphne tells her story. It’s the American dream again but this one tweaked by murder: from dirt-poor on the Canadian prairie to luxury penthouse in New York; from abuse in a one-room shack – not forgetting the church vestry - to magnificent jewels and mansions and paying the price. For what should have been a riotous progress to fame and fortune becomes repetitive, as boring for Daphne as it is for the reader, every interview, transmission, and voiceover delivered in a flat monotone, the speaker distinguished only by a change of font.
There is some relief – and a lot of venom - in reddits from fans of the podcasts. These, prefixed with pseudonyms mimicking those in current parlance, are for the main part so banal that they achieve a kind of wit, the model being one, “HauteHistoire”: a camp follower who never misses a trick and the chance to describe in exquisite detail his ensemble du jour inspired by the latest appalling Daphne revelation.
Halfway through this weighty novel the reader reverts to the question at the start: why did Daphne kill? There has to be a parallel plot and it trails a cohort of characters who are well-drawn but little more than a contrivance to provide the explanation for her compulsion to confess. As to why she killed in the first place, we have her last word on motivation: “In men, anger is an explosion. In women, it’s an abscess.”
A novel about boredom or a feminine tract? You pays your money and you takes your choice but once in paperback this one will sell like hot cakes.
