It was April of last year when we first met new author Sean Watkin and his creation, the tortured Merseyside Police DCI, Win de Silva. A whirlwind few months later, Black Water Rising was shortlisted for the Val McDermid Debut Award and the author was being spotted at some of the country’s biggest crime fiction festivals. Would he have time to get down to work and complete book two?
Thankfully, yes – and now de Silva is back in Better Off Dead, where the ripples from the devastating conclusion to book one are still rocking the boat for the DCI and her partner, DS Ben Barclay. De Silva is trapped in a loop of despair, wondering if she ever really knew the husband who killed himself in the home they shared. Barclay, meanwhile, has been blindsided by the collapse of his marriage and is living in his old room, sleeping in a lumpy single bed back at his mum’s.
But the National Crime Agency muscling in on the case sets them both on the defensive. For appearance’s sake they have to pull themselves together and get back into the game after the pair is instead assigned to take a fresh look at a cold case which is about to grow legs.
Seven months back, de Silva and Barclay had been called to Formby Woods where a long-buried, dismembered body had been discovered by a dog walker, but then Ritchie killed himself, the murders from Black Water Rising occurred, and the rest is history.
Now it appears that nobody took up the baton for the unidentified victim. Paperwork is sketchy and the two detectives who were tasked with the investigation have since left the force. It’s enough to set the spidey senses tingling, and as de Silva and Barclay look deeper into the mess they’ve been left with, they realise that their former boss held the reins.
O’Brien is now happily retired and it’s his replacement, Detective Superintendent Murphy, who is in charge. She and de Silva are like oil and water, and that spiky relationship adds a new frisson to a story that will inevitably loop back. Plotlines run through Better Off Dead like the roots of a well-nourished houseplant, twisting, turning and making sinuous U-turns when least expected. Keep going though, because there is much to surprise and engage here.
It wouldn’t be a pukka crime novel without the protagonists taking things into their own hands, and although she’s been warned off their previous case, no way is de Silva about to comply. She has always been something of a loose cannon, but with Ritchie implicated in what happened before, de Silva would run through fire and brimstone if she could get to the bottom of it all. Barclay is a straight arrow, but his current personal issues have left him vulnerable and reluctantly he goes along with her plan, such as it is.
Things are about to get darker and darker, but Watkin is a dab hand at keeping the narrative rolling along at speed, while pausing occasionally to throw in another truth grenade designed to leave you gasping. Once again, Liverpool and its immediate surrounding areas are central to everything and given a photorealistic treatment that brings the settings to life, warts and all.
If you like your police procedurals embalmed in authenticity, then this is a series that will tick a lot of the boxes. De Silva and Barclay are a well-matched odd couple, the yin and yang of detective work, and as Better Off Dead builds to yet another shocking finale it is good to know that we will be seeing them again in book three. Counting down the days already!
There’s a surprising Liverpool connection in Ann Cleeve’s Matthew Venn series, set in North Devon – starting with The Long Call.
Canelo Crime
Print/Kindle/iBook
£3.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
