Trick of the Dark

I love McDermid's work, the entire body of work, that is. There's the Kate Brannigan series, the great Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, the Lindsay Gordon series, and if you haven't yet read them you should. There are some wonderful stand-alones like The Grave Tattoo.

And there's this newest one, A Trick of the Dark. For some reason, this novel harked back to the old crime novels of Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers for me, and I can't decide quite why that is. Maybe the academic setting? Maybe the use of red herrings?

What I really greatly enjoyed about this novel was the ambiguous nature of each of the characters in it. No one comes off the hero, most are closer to being the goat. I think it is a major achievement and a demonstration of skill to have a protagonist who is slightly disturbing, as I found this one to be.

It is hardly a great lesson that no one is either all good or all bad, but it is certainly rare in fiction to find characters so precarioulsy balanced between good and evil. Unsettling in a murder mystery, when one expects a heroic crime solver and a black-as-night villain.

I thoroughly appreciated the urge to get out the tweeds and sturdy walking shoes for a spot of detection.