Crime fans are spoiled for choice these days. But sometimes, what a devoted crime reader wants isn’t anything too fancy. Sometimes, what we want is a good, solid police procedural, preferably set somewhere interesting, preferably with a troubled, renegade investigator who refuses to listen when their boss tells them to leave an avenue of investigation alone. And in Sarah Ward’s A Patient Fury, that’s exactly what we get.
This is Ward’s third mystery featuring Detective Constable Connie Childs, a CID officer in Bampton, a small town surrounded by the dark peaks of Derbyshire. Connie is back at work after the events of A Deadly Thaw, but isn’t really on top of things – she’s distracted and suffering from insomnia. Regardless, her boss, DI Sadler, calls her in the early hours after a report of suspicious deaths following a house fire. When they arrive, Connie vomits when she sees the superbly grotesque scene displayed in a broken window: “Dangling behind the ruined glass was the outline of a body slowly revolving in a sickening dance. As they watched, the face turned towards them.”
But there’s more: the body is that of a woman – a mother. The burning house also contains the bodies of her husband and her small son, whom the reader already knows have been killed with a claw hammer. Connie jumps to the conclusion that “we’re going to be looking at another case where a man thought it was okay to obliterate a family because of his skewed thinking”, but forensics point to the mother, Francesca, as the murderer. It looks cut-and-dried, but Connie, small and combative, just can’t accept it. It doesn’t make sense, she keeps saying. And “don’t you think acts have got to have a logic to them?””
When Sadler won’t listen – hurrah for that wayward copper I was after – Connie sets out to prove why, digging into the history of the surviving family, Francesca’s stepson and stepdaughter George and Julia, uncovering more about their tragic past. Because this isn’t the first member of their family to be declared dead under mysterious circumstances: almost 40 years before, George and Julia’s mother went missing, leaving a note on the door saying she’d be back in two minutes, and never returned.
Ward, a Derbyshire resident, crime-fiction blogger and judge for the Petrona award for Scandinavian translated crime novels, layers her story together carefully. We jump back and forth in time, and between perspectives, as the details of the past mystery and present murders become clearer. Julia, an intriguing figure, is a tour guide to the local caves by day, and by night takes tourists on ghost walks around the town. She also posts pleading messages on missing persons websites, begging the mother she still believes is alive to come home. “I will survive this, she thought. The darkness won’t overcome me. This is not the first bad thing to have happened to me.”
Ward scatters her clues carefully. It’s not hard to work out who everything’s pointing to, but it’s enjoyable putting it all together, and both Connie, “a girl who things happen to”, and Julia (“I feel frozen. It’s like a sheet of glass is separating me from the rest of the world. I’m trying to feel emotion but there’s nothing there”), are intelligent, perceptive companions along the way.
• A Patient Fury by Sarah Ward is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
