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.
The first murder was forty years ago: a cold case, it’s foisted on DI Shona Oliver shortly after she’s relocated to the far south-west of Scotland. The thinking being that she can do no harm there pending the result of a Police Inquiry into the murder of her previous boss. Mention of her own involvement in his drowning are opaque and confusing to a reader coming fresh to Oliver as a series character with a life behind her already, so it’s best to dismiss such back references for now and concentrate on the old unsolved case.
Ailsa Scott was seventeen when she was bludgeoned to death on the cliffs above Port Patrick. Now, decades later, her younger sister, Isobel, is dying of cancer, cared for by her husband, DI Dalrymple, on compassionate leave. Dalrymple is haunted by the old case, convinced that the killer is a local man living undetected but not unsuspected in his own fiefdom, now Shona’s, in this small corner of Galloway. His own compulsion to know the truth is augmented by Isobel whose last wish, he tells Shona, is to know her sister’s killer. Dodgy emotional blackmail but it works.
Shona agrees to look at the file and immediately runs into trouble. One of the suspects is the coxswain of the local lifeboat, and father of the boy her own daughter, Becca, is dating. A doubly delicate situation since Shona is a member of the lifeboat crew herself, her mettle tested within a day of her arrival by a tricky rescue from a yacht on a sandbank in the Solway Firth. The stricken boat is crewed by two brothers who were fighting before they grounded and continue slogging it out after the lifeboat takes them aboard. In the melee Shona sustains a bloody nose and a black eye. A hilarious piece of padding, you think, and only much later realise that it’s an anecdote that takes rather too many words to make its point. More instances follow.
A Cold Harbour purports to be a Police Procedural but a desultory investigation into the cold case is overtaken by the startling appearance of Shona’s mother, a former heroin addict who had abandoned her baby daughter at the age of three. As if Shona hasn’t enough problems with the National Crime Agency on her heels, and her realisation that her daughter may be at risk from a suspected killer, now Becca is in touch with her grandmother and demanding a family reunion. Shona demurs but Becca insists; the reunion goes ahead and fails.
There is another murder: no cold case this but a hot brutal killing with a farmer run down by thieves in the night who reverse and run over him again.
Now the book gets into gear. As Shona’s tiny CID team prepares to winkle out suspects they are faced with a broad spectrum. From wild and hostile campers on the Southern Uplands Way who vandalize bothies and “leave middens” through opportunist equipment thieves to organised crime and county lines, stuff starts to coalesce. It needs only one name to come up twice for Shona to know where she has heard it before, and a nebulous link is forged between Ailsa’s savage murder and this one where the killer makes so doubly sure of success.
A Cold Harbour is clever because it’s not what it seems, and to name its theme would be the ultimate spoiler. It’s superficially flawed with too many words and some slippery grammar (but I love the lingo “as spoken in Galloway”) and at least one question is never answered. For all that it’s a nicely complicated puzzle behind the loquacity and you can’t help but admire the end with its audacious plug that has to be the start of the next fraught DI Shona Oliver.
