It seems like the coldest of cold cases when DI Karen Pirie is asked to locate a man missing for almost quarter of a decade, but Mick Prentice's daughter is desperate to find a potential bone marrow match for her dying child. She and her mother had closed their hearts to Mick since the night he, and five other scabs, vanished from the mining town of Newton of Wemyss in the middle of the 1984 national miner's strike; anonymous envelopes of money begin arriving shortly afterward, postmarked Nottingham. It was, according to all account, atypical for a man so devoted to the cause, but emotions and tension were high, and the devastating effects of Thatcher's union busting strategies had left many families in despair. Only, when Karen looks, Mick isn't in Nottingham with the other scabs...
At the same time as Mick's disappearance, a young mother and her infant child were kidnapped in nearby Fife. The only child and grandchild of wealthy Sir Broderick McLellan Grant, they were worth a small fortune, a price Grant was prepared to pay. However, in the handover process something went awry, and Grant's daughter was shot dead, his grandson vanished, and his wife died by her own hand shortly thereafter. Two decades on Grant is remarried, with a young son, but his first family have never left his mind. When journalist Bel Richmond discovers a clue to the mystery while in Tuscany, the case is reopened.
There is an interesting duality throughout the novel - two cases, two places, two mysteries, two very different social landscapes, and two eras - as the text switches between between police and journalistic investigations, and between 1984/85 and 2007. In general, as a character references events in the past the text takes us there, providing a concrete example (which I'm usually so poor at doing) of what sets McDermid's work above the usual mystery hack's efforts.
I particularly liked the neat and integral incorporation of the social contexts of the strike action - the consequences for miners at the time, the corruption of the union, and the pressures on both those who stayed and those who left. Markedly different from her well-known Wire in the Blood series, A Darker Domain is ambitiously complex and it's all show no tell, gripping and nuanced, with a spectacular pay off.
These strong elements make the obvious connection between the cases, and the length of time it takes Karen to discover them, all the more disappointing. As I've said before, I don't read mysteries with the intention of discovering what happened for myself, so when I do I'm usually displeased. I was waiting for a twist to reveal that I'd been mislead, but instead the novel concludes with a character acting without forethought and in unnecessary panic. Many of the characters were at least partly unpleasant, leaving me nobody to root for.
However, McDermid sub-par is still better than many of her colleagues, and for the most party I did enjoy A Darker Domain, and look forward to more of her work. - Alex
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