Review of Ash and Bones by Mike Thomas, pub. Zaffre Publishing 2016
Will MacReady, on his first day with Cardiff CID, joins a team already stretched by a policeman's murder. Now a divorced man out for visiting time with his son has found something in the docks that oughtn't to be there…
Cornelius - yet another MOP who seemed desperate to tell their life story to a complete stranger - had been arguing with his new girlfriend on the phone while Lucas threw stones into the water. Calling for his daddy to come look. Pointing out through the railings, at the mouth of the dry dock. When |Cornelius ended the call and went to his son, he saw what Lucas was looking at.[…]
MacReady checked across the dock at Davidson. He was bent over at the waist, laughing as the kid skittered around his legs, dropping F-bombs every couple of steps.
"My ex is going to murder me." Cornelius moaned.
"I truly hope not," MacReady said.
"There's none of us left to investigate if she does," Lee offered.
This little vignette demonstrates a number of the characteristics of this, Mike Thomas's third novel drawing on his background as a long-serving South Wales policeman. The way the police, like the fire and ambulance service, necessarily harden themselves with brittle jocularity to what they see. The way their patience with members of the public - MOPs - wears thin. The way Thomas, as always, does not make the error of explaining this kind of trade argot but leaves you to pick up on it as you go, so that it always sounds completely natural. And the presence, absence and importance of children, a pivotal factor in this novel.
Thomas's last two novels were not about crime but rather about being a policeman and what that might do to people. This one is too, but it is also about the actual solving of a crime. The protagonists in Pocket Notebook and Ugly Bus didn't spend a whole lot of their novels doing that; they were too busy working through their own problems and the minutiae of police procedure, as well as, in some cases, actually committing crimes. I loved both books, by the way, and was worried, before I read this one, that the "crime novel" aspect might get in the way of the character development and interaction which he has been so good at.
But it doesn't. We are at two ends of a crime which moves between Nigeria and the UK by way of Portugal, and while for most of the time we are with the Cardiff police who only know about their end of things, sometimes the narration shifts so that we see what is happening elsewhere and can make a partial guess at what might be going on. This ratchets up the tension considerably, because where we suspect the narrative may be going is where we desperately don't want it to go, and by the end it is as unputdownable for that reason as any crime novel should be. For me, though, it was already gripping for other reasons: the host of rich and believable minor characters, the cross-talk between the policemen which was such a feature of the first two novels, the unexpected but perfectly feasible compunction that begins to develop in some of the villains about what they are doing and makes you realise, unwillingly, that nobody is all of a piece.
Then there's the personal story of MacReady. His back-story resembles that of Jacob in Pocket Notebook, while his character, doggedly fighting off the cynicism that goes with the job, bears some likeness to Martin from Ugly Bus. But unlike them, he is envisaged as a character developing over several novels, rather than just one. So far, I'd say he definitely has the necessary depth and possibility to sustain reader interest over a series, and I'm glad to note from the author's recent blog tour that MacReady's next adventures are already written.