The journalist Stig Abell has such a versatile CV – moving from the Sun to editorship of the TLS and then to his present morning slot on Times Radio – that it’s no surprise he has dipped a toe into the crime-writing waters where so many semi-celebrities increasingly swim. What may be surprising, given the rigours of the genre, is how well he’s done it.
Death Under a Little Sky sits on the cusp of cosy crime. Jake Jackson is a police detective in London whose life changes when an oddball uncle dies, leaving him a large house deep in a nameless part of England, complete with acreage and a lake. The legacy coincides with the end of Jackson’s marriage and comes with enough cash to allow him to resign from his job.
His subsequent retreat to Little Sky, the slightly twee name of his new holding, constitutes a sea-change, as initially Jackson’s life is almost solitary – the nearest tiny village, with a single shop that doubles as a pub, is a long walk away, and there is no phone signal in the house and no internet. Jackson spends most of his days swimming in the icy lake and reading his late uncle’s collection of crime fiction.
The bones turn out to be the remains of a young woman who fell to her death ten years earlier
Then he meets Livia, the local vet, and their mutual attraction is immediate, though largely unexpressed. When, in the course of the village’s treasure hunt, human bones are discovered, they turn out to be the remains of a young woman who fell to her death on a nearby farm ten years earlier. Was she pushed? Did she jump? Livia helps Jackson investigate the mystery – and, inevitably, there is another death, this time indisputably violent.
The book is a deliberately old-fashioned mystery, well-plotted and for the most part well-paced. It is not without flaws: there are the standard number of surprises found in cosy crime, which is to say not many at all; the courtship of Jackson and Livia is so protracted that one despairs of the prospect of any future Jacksons, and the dialogue is often stiffly and unconvincingly formal, lacking the cadence of conversation. There are also far too many references to crime literature and authors, as if Abell were trying to win the club’s acceptance by his display of knowledge of its members.
But this is small beer compared to the book’s strengths. The descriptive prose, especially Abell’s writing about nature, is often very beautiful, without excess or indulgence. The local inhabitants are vividly portrayed – including an obsessive botanist who is mad about hedgerows, and some menacing yokels who could have strayed out of Straw Dogs. The plot is also cleverly constructed, as if handled by a veteran, and richly but never confusingly dense. Two more titles featuring Jake Jackson have apparently been signed up, and provided Abell makes this a lasting rather than staging post of his CV, all bodes well for the development of the series.
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