Set in a world imprecisely aligned with our own, this is a bleak fairytale about man’s inhumanity to man and about how love seems to survive in unexpected places. It’s also about how society creates scapegoats to deal with inconvenient memories. There is certainly crime in this novel, but whether it’s crime fiction is a different question. Whatever it is, it’s well worth reading.

Jim Kelly has already built up a solid reputation with his crime novels about a journalist in the Fens. With Death Wore White (Penguin paperback original, £7.99) he has branched out into a new series based around King’s Lynn. At the heart of it are two CID officers, the ambitious Detective Inspector Shaw whose career is haunted by the disgrace of his father, also a police officer, and his father’s former colleague Detective Sergeant Valentine, an old-style chain-smoking detective tarnished with failure. A blizzard strands eight vehicles on a remote coast road. Three hours later one of the drivers is dead. There are no footprints in the snow, so this is an apparently impossible murder. From here the story branches out into a complex investigation involving, among others things, cockle-pickers, the unresolved case that ruined Shaw’s father, and a lot more bodies. Though the plot is perhaps a little too busy for its own good, Kelly breathes new life into vintage elements of the genre — the impossible murder and the closed circle of suspects. He’s excellent on the setting too, capturing the essence of contemporary West Norfolk with an intelligent sympathy shorn of sentimentality.

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