Alicia Moore is a deputy sheriff in a small, socially conservative, deeply religious town in rural Kentucky. She’s married to Bill and has a son, Bart, in the seventh grade. She’s also the daughter of a well-respected former sheriff of the town. In short, she’s the kind of person whom one might expect to be a pillar of the local community.
Far from it.
Moore has a history of bad decisions. The latest is an ill-advised affair with a local man, Abe, the attraction purely sexual with zero emotional involvement. The physical release is fleeting, but the regret and shame linger.
But her worst decisions were made 20 years ago, as a teenager. Engaged to Jake Paisley, the couple spent a lot of time getting high in the flat of a local man who was gradually losing his sanity. At the height of his madness, Greg Walpole picked up a trucker in town with the promise of free drugs and murdered him in a tobacco barn located by the banks of the Blood River. The victim was crucified upside down and disembowelled, in a ritual that Walpole insisted had been shown to him by a demon living in the river.
Moore and Paisley were arrested as potential accomplices, and since the interview Moore and her father have barely spoken again. Despite being cleared, Moore has never shaken off the reputation she gained for knowing Walpole, no matter how peripherally.
It was the kind of murder that a small town never truly recovers from, so when a second occurs, in the same location, done in a very similar fashion, tensions run high in the community. Moore, known behind her back as the Blood River Witch, is quickly convicted in the court of popular opinion. It doesn’t help her case that this time the victim is her ex-fiancée, Paisley.
Her boss, Sheriff Parsons, who is running a campaign for political office, and who recognises a no-win situation when he sees it, quickly calls in the Kentucky State Police, and the detective in charge, Doug Mackinnon, has reservations about Moore’s involvement in the investigation given her personal connection to both murders.
Moore is a classic outsider protagonist in this rural noir. She’s not fully trusted in her own department, is the focus of suspicion in the community she’s expected to police, and there are problems at home. Reading Blood River Witch it’s easy to empathise with this stubborn, determined investigator who soldiers on despite the hostility toward her, but her attributes are balanced with poor choices, impulsivity and recklessness.
She’s an unreliable narrator and Martinson keeps us guessing as to how truthful she is with herself (and us) about her involvement in the crimes.
Martinson’s writing is lyrical and evocative in a manner that fans of James Lee Burke will admire, rich in description of the beautiful Kentucky countryside and with a lyrical, almost biblical style. You’re never allowed to forget how important religion and superstition can be in small communities.
Moore, frustrated with the lack of progress in the case, and her own minor role in it, takes matters in to her own hands. She conducts interviews without the knowledge of Parsons or Mackinnon, and even involves a visiting PhD Criminology student whom the department has stonewalled. Lucas Masterson is a young black, British man – another outsider – whose thesis involves the role of occult ritual in murder.
He knows a lot about the first murder 20 years ago, perhaps more than anyone in the department, and has some compelling ideas about potential avenues of investigation. Will Moore’s decision to overlook the startling coincidence of his arrival just as a second murder takes place prove to be the bad decision that finally damns her?
Blood River Witch is something of a throwback in an age of where the best sellers are domestic thrillers and glamorous espionage adventures, but it is no worse for that. Crime fiction is a broad church, and there will always be a place beautifully written novels rich in atmosphere and peopled with compelling, fully realised characters. I look forward to whatever TJ Martinson writes next.
We have plenty of features on brilliant rural noir. Why not check out our review of Holy City by Henry Wise, and then explore the site further?
Counterpoint
Print/Kindle/iBook
£18.58
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
