The Red Saw

I have been reading William Shaw’s novels avidly for the last dozen years. Starting with his swinging 60’s, London-set, Breen and Tozer novels, through The Bird Watcher, which morphed into the Alex Cupidi Dungeness set novels, and now I’m following him down the coast to Teignmouth in Devon to meet Eden Driscoll.

Shaw was never a police officer (he was a journalist) but he gives us the strongest sense of what a life in the police is really like (not glamourous). He is a master at setting his action in the real world, full of characters you met last week in ASDA, or complained with at the bus stop about how it’s all going to hell in a hand cart. This book is full of real people, real lives, and the evocation of a working port is incredibly well done. You can smell the salt in the air and the vinegar on the chips.

The Red Shore gives us London copper Eden Driscoll. He’s mid-career, single, and angry with life. He has an old-fashioned morality (that we will later find comes from guilt, shame, and the kind of dad you run away from) and a rigid sense of right and wrong. His life is then blown up when his sister – who he hasn’t seen since he was fifteen years old – is reported missing, presumed dead. That’s bad enough, but she leaves a nine-year old son who Driscoll has never met, but he’s now the only relative who can keep the kid out of care, and Driscoll knows what going into care can do to a nine-year old.

Though it means leaving a big case in London, he goes down to Devon, supposedly for two days, but you know he is going to get trapped there. So we have a cop who’s a fish out of water, and with no jurisdiction in Devon. The local police won’t share evidence – so what can he do?  He has to investigate his sister’s disappearance and put his career on the line. And you know he’s going to uncover a messy cover-up and a whole heap of trouble. He’s going to find dead bodies, be threatened, beaten up, and meet a whole group of characters who will become friends, lovers and villains in books two and three. Classic crime. Fantastic location. Characters to root for.

The Red Shore is a rare treat.  I suggest you settle down with a coffee and a biscuit and get transported into Eden Driscoll’s life. You’ll feel like you’ve been on holiday to the seaside and found a dead body in your cheap hotel room. The perfect get-away.