[I am reading this 2019 novel in sections, writing about each one before reading on. So far I have read two sections. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
21 May 2026
A note on Dalgliesh’s prose: I decided within a few pages of starting this novel to read it for the plot, not the style. Dalgliesh, who began writing through self-publishing, creates a new novel roughly every three months, and you can tell. It seems poorly proofread, and with a tendency to cliches and stock phrases. Four or five times on every page find myself thinking, really? Couldn’t you have found a more original form of words than that? For instance, a couple of sentences from a random page: ‘Richard fell for the woman who would up sticks on a whim and take off somewhere new at the drop of a hat. … That was a positive for she wasn’t one to let the grass grow under her feet.’ That’s at least four stock phrases in 40 words or so—but, as I said, I’m reading this as a whodunit, not a style manual
Chapters 1-6, then 7-14
Police procedural. Coastal north Norfolk. There’s a prologue, in which we find out that a schoolgirl called Holly is at an impromptu beach bonfire with friends. She’s with a boy she allows to kiss her, tongue and everything, but she’s fantasising about leaving the place entirely. We don’t know why, but it’s only ‘Maddie’ who makes her regret planning to leave. We later find out Maddie is Holly’s younger sister, that Holly is—was, because she’s dead by the start of Chapter 1—in the sixth form, and that she was clearly never in agreement with her parents’ middle-class dreams of conventional success. Conventional, as in they’re doctors who want her to go to medical school. They pay for private tuition to get her the grades, and for music lessons.
…but she went to the beach instead of her lesson in Norwich on Friday evening. Today is Saturday, and she was supposed to have been at a music performance in the evening. I’m mentioning the details because Dalgliesh is making a big thing of class expectations. Eric, a rookie detective and the inspector’s sidekick, is uncomfortable even going inside the nicely appointed Bettany house, where Holly lived with her parents and sister. Colin Bettany seems something of a bully, making sure both the coppers know who’s important in this town. Or village—it’s Burnham Market, the kind of comfortable, gentrified place loved by people like the Bettanys. At least they live here—their house isn’t a holiday home. Eric himself was born in Norfolk and, unlike his brother and sister, never left. He’s from a working family, and has never stopped resenting how his mother was treated by the middle-class families who employed her as a home help. They were no help at all when she became too ill to work.
Plot? We meet DI Tom Janssen before we know who he is, and that young girl he’s looking after is the daughter of Alice, a friend of his from childhood days. He’s called away from a Saturday morning trip with both of them to look at a newly-discovered body, Holly’s, and suspects start to line up nicely. Mark McCall, Holly’s not-boyfriend—although her friend has told Eric that he thought he was—is from a family the locals all consider trouble. Jane Francis, the witness who notified the police, says he was looking at the body as she approached, but went off when he saw her. (This later turns out to be true—the boy doesn’t deny it, but says he only left because he hates Jane, calling her a witch.) The friend also says there had been a row between Holly and Mark’s father Callum, in public, only a few days before. No, she doesn’t know what it was about….
The detectives visit Jane Francis and her husband Ken. He’s a well-known and successful artist, but keeps himself to himself. They’ve only moved to the area within the last couple of years, and it’s made clear both by the deadpan narrator and by what the police notice that he is neither a hands-on father nor a caring husband. From the inside of Jane’s head—the narrator takes us wherever he wants—we see that she is tired of her husband’s combined laziness—or is it withdrawal?—and pretence of being good around the house. In fact, he lives in his own bubble and never does anything domestic—although Jane, we begin to find out, covers for him. I’ll come back to them, because the coppers do.
And why has Dalgliesh made it so obvious that Jane fancies Janssen so much? It’s her sharp gaze that provides us with the only clear description of what he looks like, tall and good-looking. Might she be ready to be more open with him as time and boredom goes on? He isn’t married, although he’s always thinking about it, especially when looking after Saffy, or Sapphire, Alice’s daughter. Like Eric, he’s a local boy—but he’s only just returned to sleepy Norfolk after spending most of his life elsewhere. We wonder if there might be some incipient love-interest, first from Alice, now Jane—and soon Tamara Greave, the chief investigating officer from Norwich. She wears an engagement ring, but is clearly unimpressed both by her fiancé’s ultra-conventional Christian family and the way he keeps aiming to pacify them.
When she arrives next day, Sunday, the preliminary inquiries well under way. Eric, ultra-conscious of his rookie status, has discovered a ‘stash’—his word—of drawings by Holly and by a more experienced artist. We know from somewhere that Holly had spent time in Ken’s studio, as student and model—and then Dalgliesh gives the plot a heavy nudge. On Saturday night, Ken’s studio had been completely trashed, and graffiti daubed on the walls and the accumulated wreckage of broken art-works. Weirdly, Ken pretends to Janssen that he thinks it was probably just kids, and Janssen is suitably unimpressed. And he lies about knowing Holly, at the same time that Jane is telling Tamara that she had often been in the studio with him.
Jane’s reaction, at the end of Chapter 14, is unexpected. It’s the first vaguely interesting thing to have happened, about a third of the way through the book, and it’s clearly there to get us wondering about both her and her husband. The police have left, Jane has just told Ken off for lying about Holly, and he’s crying over her death. ‘“What has got into you?” She saw her words cut him deeply. He looked ready to cry again. “She’s dead, Jane. Holly’s dead.” “And what makes her any more special [Dalgliesh’s italics] than all of those who came before? Nothing!” … His head dropped and tears welled. Turning on her heel, she stalked back towards the house “Get a grip and sort yourself out, Ken. You can’t leave it all to me this time!”’ Why have they moved to Norfolk in the last year or so? Why does she clearly consider herself to be one keeping this marriage going? And what on earth does her husband do that she’s had to sort out at least once before?
Other stuff. The murderer appears not to be Mark McCall, bullied by his routinely sarcastic and possibly violent father, and shocked by Holly’s death. Everyone seems to know about Holly’s dismissive attitude to her parents’ ambitions for her except the parents themselves. (We, of course, have read all about it in the prologue.) Is Callum McCall violent enough to kill somebody like Holly? Meanwhile, Tamara is as intrigued by Janssen as Jane is. What’s his story? Why is there a child seat in his car—and why does he never mention having to leave his family for the whole weekend? And why, after he has told her about how his Dutch grandfather returned to England after the War because he couldn’t face life without Janssen’s future grandmother, does she react so dreamily? ‘“That’s a beautiful story.” She spoke softly before turning her gaze back towards the passing landscape.’ Be still, my beating heart.
Chapters 15-28
It chugs along, and Dalgliesh plays the omniscient author more than most thriller writers. We’ve had Janssen’s point of view, Eric’s, Tamara’s, Mark’s—and Jane’s, which is the most intriguing…. But I’ll come back to that, because other leads are being followed about who might be involved in the murder. And the vandalism on Ken’s studio—which has been followed by an arson attack, both of them partially focused on the double bed where, we now know for certain, Ken spent quality time with Holly. Was it Mark? He’s on the autism spectrum, but perceptive enough to know that he was never going to be Holly’s boyfriend. There’s unfinished business to do with his mother, who disappeared five or six years ago, and he still holds imaginary conversations with her. He seems to be a genuinely sensitive soul, appreciated the way Holly used to stand up for him, and Janssen doesn’t think the murder was anything to do with him. But what are those red shoes, hidden in one of the McCalls’ outhouses? One of the drawings was of Holly in red shoes.
Could it be Callum? Of course it could, but he doesn’t have much of a motive. Nevertheless, Mark is surprised at how much his father talks to the detectives when they organise a search at his house. Not his usual sullen taciturnity at all—and we wonder if he might be covering something up. Those shoes, Mark hints as he talks to himself, were like something his mother would wear…. Did she really leave? Or is there another story? And are the shoes just a red herring?
While I’m asking questions…. Was the drawing featuring red shoes definitely of Holly? And am I right to assume it was by Ken? Could it have been by Mark? Or, and I’ve just thought of this, by his sister? That’s four more questions—and I should say more about Mark’s sister before I ask any more. We haven’t met her, but her room was examined along with all the others in the police search. She’s an ordinary teenage girl by the looks of it, not averse to making herself look presentable…. Are the shoes hers? Was she another of Ken Francis’s models—red shoes and all—and might she have had something to do with the letters and vandalism? The letters are hate-mail Ken has been receiving (by mail, or posted through the door? I can’t remember), and Jane only tells him to tell the police after the arson attack. What’s her game?
Ken, from the conversations Jane has with him, seems to be a sex addict. Her only reason for staying with him, on the face of it, is the prosperous lifestyle. But her life is pretty thin, in fact, bringing up two junior school-age kids she doesn’t engage with much and skivvying for a husband who’s away with the fairies. Or with whoever his penis—Jane almost spits the word—points him at. But Dalgliesh goes out of his way, deep inside her consciousness in fact, to show us how seriously manipulative she is. She scrutinises the detectives for any weaknesses, i.e. anything that marks them out as inferior to her and, if it’s to her advantage, she speaks to Ken with all the contempt she clearly feels. Is she a sociopath? She’s certainly a narcissist, seeing other people only for what she can get out of them. And judging by how she first regarded Janssen all those chapters ago, she’s as quick to think in terms of sexual possibilities as her husband is.
Ken. Is he as pathetic as Jane calls him to his face? He seems so. The back-story is that they had to move out of London, having been arrested for sexually molesting one of his models. She was a few years older than Holly… but she drops the charges, and other accusations don’t make the courts because there isn’t enough evidence. Do the letters refer to that time? And could one of those accusers be trashing Ken’s studio and work? Whatever, Eric is trying to trace the woman who dropped charges because it would be good to get a fuller picture.
Which only seems to leave Holly’s parents as possible suspects. Really? Holly’s sister Maddie confirms what we already know, that her father is a control freak. But could he really have anything to do with the crimes we know about? He’s brought in for questioning, but only because he punches Ken Francis in the eye when he finds out he was seeing Holly without his permission. OK, she’s seventeen, but he has always told her exactly what she must and must not do. It’s only now that he is coming to realise that she was going her own way, which wasn’t the way to medical school. He’s sarcastic when he’s shown the letters, joking about the undoctorly scrawl and the poor spelling, what with him being a proud Wykehamist. (An alumnus of Winchester, as somebody has to explain to somebody else.) As for his wife, the other Dr Bettany…. She’s hardly figured so far, so it seems unlikely. Unless—and Dalgliesh is proud to label these novels the ‘Hidden Norfolk’ series—there’s incest involved. We might find out when there’s a DNA test done on Holly. Or, to be more precise, on the three-month-old foetus she’s carrying. Ken’s? Mark’s? (Almost certainly not.) Her father’s?
Who knows? And, since the only character I’m finding remotely interesting is the put-upon autistic lad, who cares?
Chapters 29-37—to the end…
…by which time, Dalgliesh hasn’t given himself enough room to make the revelation a surprise. Mark, now knowing who the murderer is, goes looking for him with the shotgun Callum had hidden from the police when they searched the place. Callum had told him about Holly and Ken, and the visit she had paid to his studio on the night of the murder. (We know about it too. Jane had confronted Ken with it, and he’d admitted she was not only there, but pleading with him to take her away to a new life. He’d sent her away in tears, he said.) So Janssen and Tamara go chasing after Mark, but they don’t find him at Ken and Jane’s. What’s going on? The murderer clearly isn’t Callum, or Mark’s sister, so it must be… Holly’s father. I’ll come back to the not-very-big reveal in a bit.
Before we get to it, the cops hang around long enough for Jane and Callum, who is conveniently tagging along for the chase, to explain their own back-story. Dalgliesh has recently revealed to us that she’s a local girl who had gone away for her own unexplained reasons—which turn out to be to escape the dreadful reputation she had. This would explain her highly sexualised impression of Janssen when she first saw him—it’s a hidden clue to her character. Clever (sexist?) Dalgliesh. She and Callum had been together long ago, and the public row we’ve recently heard about between them was to do, she says, with her wanting to end what they had re-started since her return. Callum says rubbish, she couldn’t get enough of him. (It’s unfortunate that the two sex-addicts in the story clearly don’t get what they need from marriage….) And, oh yeh, Janssen has enough time to confirm that Callum wrote the mysterious letters—except he wrote threatening ones to Ken and blackmail-type ones to Jane. That’s what the row was about.
Finally, finally, Janssen works out what Mark must have in mind. The police know he had taken Holly’s phone, and had used it a couple of times to contact somebody in the past few hours. By now, they know Mark is convinced the police only work on behalf of the well-off, pinning their crimes on people like the McCalls. He must have been arranging a meeting so the police-protected killer would face proper justice, death by sawn-off shotgun. Janssen knows where he would meet the killer, the woods he always goes to overlooking the sea. And, as an inconvenient sea fog arrives just in time for Dalgliesh to make it all as confusing as he can—not very—everything comes down to a minute-by-minute pursuit. Janssen and Tamara split up, and it’s her point of view we follow….
Muffled sounds. Shadowy figures, one pointing the silhouette of a shotgun at the other. A cliff edge, 60 feet above rocks. (Really? In Norfolk?) The figure with the gun forcing the other backwards towards the edge—and the one being threatened is Mark! Janssen finally arrives to tackle the gunman, but not in time to stop Mark losing his footing. While Janssen wrestles with the unnamed shadowy figure, Tamara just manages to grab hold of Mark’s hands as he falls. Can she hold on? No… yes… no… (etc.) Can Janssen finally disarm the nasty man and help her?
What do you think? Mark is saved, and the story emerges of Colin Bettany’s control-freakery getting the better of him as he followed Holly from Ken’s He’d been spying on her for most of the night, it seems, Maddie’s ruse to give him the slip having failed—and when Holly didn’t simply give in to him, he lost his rag entirely. But, after the murder, he’d got enough composure to plant those red shoes on the McCalls’ property. It was seeing them that convinced Mark the police were trying to pin the murder on the family that everyone always blames for everything. Somebody, possibly Dalgliesh himself, reminds us that the most powerful influence on an impressionable child is that of the family. And Mark McCall had been hearing his father’s self-justifications all his life.
Believe all that if you want. I’ll go and read something better now.
We can read it for you wholesale 