Sarah Hilary’s heady mix of razor-sharp characterisation and 4K-ready sense of place have stood her in good stead since 2014, when she debuted with Someone Else’s Skin and in the process introduced London-based DI Marnie Rome to crime fiction lovers. We reviewed that first novel and have looked forward to the next and the next and the next ever since.

After that series ended, she devoted herself to standalones – and damn good they’ve been too. Now Hilary has returned to her first love: police procedurals with a twist. You’ll find no flat-footed, dour and dismally lacking cops in the pages of her books; instead, say hello to DS Joe Ashe, a police officer with as many layers as a carefully cultivated onion.

Ashe is based in Edenscar – pronounced Enscar – in the Derbyshire Peak District. It’s the place where he was born and brought up – and somewhere that someone with his back story would have run far, far away from, if they had any sense. The layers are about to come away, one by one…

The Drowning Place opens with a dramatic vignette. A bunch of Edenscar school children are on a coach, excitedly heading off on an educational trip, when the driver gets distracted and the vehicle and all of its passengers end up in Lady Bower reservoir. Young Joe Ashe is the only survivor of the tragic crash. They don’t call this area the Dark Peak for nothing.

The fact he survived, and the suspicion that Ashe sees the ghosts of his dead classmates, make him a divisive member of the close-knit community. Some people want to beat him to a pulp, others ignore him, while a sad and sorry few believe in the ghost stories and treat him as some kind of psychic medium cum therapist.

Meanwhile, Ashe tries to make his peace with the dead, and with himself, by throwing himself into his work – peeling off another layer when we realise that the person he confides in most is Sammi, the best friend he lost in the bus crash, who haunts him still – both literally and figuratively.

So, we have a cop whose past won’t leave him alone, and in DI Laurie Bower, Hilary adds another to the mix. Bower is an experienced officer whose natural habitat is in the mean streets of Greater Manchester, a woman who lost her sister and blames herself for the death. She arrives on a six-month secondment just as Joe and his fellow DS, Ted Vicars, follow up a call about intruders at a holiday home and find an arsenal of weapons and a booby trap that nearly separates Vicars’ head from the rest of his body.

If she’s honest, Bower was expecting the odd bit of sheep rustling or drunk and disorderly on her new patch, but this is a step up from the average bit of rural crime. And then a local couple and their baby son are killed in their home and the community closes in upon itself, giving little away to the investigators. Suddenly a town that has never recovered from tragedy is faced with another, and the cracks begin to show. Both Bower and Ashe must use all of their local knowledge, guile and street smarts if they’re going to find the murderer, but help comes from an unexpected source.

The Drowning Place is an intelligently plotted and hugely immersive read, with authentically rendered settings. The Peak District is a beautiful, unspoilt area that attracts countless tourists each year, but for those living there it can be a claustrophobic, shadowy and unfriendly place – something that the author conveys with aplomb.

Hilary also creates a whole swathe of interesting characters. It didn’t take me long to warm to world weary Laurie Bower, a feisty, clever cop whose home life is a minefield. There’s a great list of supporting players too, including the spectral Sammi. But the star of the show is Joe Ashe. Hilary portrays him as a man of contrasts: fragile but with nerves of steel; quiet but when he has something to say, everyone listens; a loner, living with his ghosts and demons. Flawed cops make for a crowded field in crime fiction, but Joe is unique and I can’t wait to meet him again.

So, this thoughtfully plotted, surprising and occasionally moving book ticks all of the boxes – but a special mention must be made of the author’s prose. I’ll leave you with a line that will stay long with me: “Friday dawned like a Poundland apocalypse”. Hat tip, Ms Hilary!

You can read our 2023 interview with Sarah Hilary here.

Harvill
Print/Kindle/iBook
£5.99

CFL Rating: 5 Stars

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