Review of The Malice of Waves by Mark Douglas-Home

Cal McGill works as a sea detective, trying to determine where bodies that enter the water might travel to.  He’s often hired by families seeking to find the resting place of a loved one.  In this case, it’s David Wheeler, an English father who is hunting for answers in relation to the disappearance of his son, Max, from a small island in the Outer Hebrides.  The boy had been spending a night alone camping on Priest’s Island when he vanished, his body never found.  Wheeler is convinced his son was murdered by a local and has become obsessed with finding his killer. Every year he has sent an investigator with a different skill set to try and crack the case.  The arrival of the investigator along with Wheeler and his three daughters to mark the anniversary of the disappearance sets the small community on edge as they rally round to protect their reputation from what they feel are unfounded accusations. The question is, can McGill succeed where others have failed?

The Malice of Waves is the third instalment in the sea detective series. It’s not easy to find a fresh angle in crime fiction, but Douglas-Home manages to carve out a little niche with an oceanographer who specialises in tracking bodies lost at sea. In this case Cal McGill is drafted in to help find out what happened to a boy who disappeared from a small island five year’s previously. His presence in the local community is resented and family are hardly welcoming either. He’s joined in the Outer Hebrides by Helen Jamieson, a police officer pretending to an ordinary member of the public trying to get over a failed relationship. While Cal rubs the locals and family up the wrong way while trying to get a handle on the local currents, Helen makes friends with the locals by the hanging around the local tea shop. Douglas-Home creates a strong sense of place and immerses the reader in the tense relations between the locals and family.  There’s nice characterisation of the villagers and the Wheeler family, with both Cal and Helen being appealing leads. The pace is steady and unrushed and the plot has plenty of blinds and misdirection.  While the main thread is nicely constructed, the plotline with Pinkee Pryke, a poacher of bird eggs, felt like a plot device and was a little underdeveloped and not fully resolved.  Overall, an engaging and atmospheric detective story.

Review of The Woman Who Walked into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home (Sandstone Press, 2013)

When just a few hours old Anna Wells was dropped at a hospital in Inverness, anonymous except for a broach left with her.  Twenty six years later, events in the coastal village she was born in lead to her being informed as to the identity of her mother.  Leaving her young daughter with a friend she travels to Poltown to discover why she was abandoned, lodging in her mother’s old house.  What she discovers is that the night she was born her mother walked into the sea, her hat and bag being found in the next bay.  As Anna comes to terms with her history and tries to discover the reasons for her mother’s apparent suicide, her presence unsettles a community that is already divided between those wanting the place to stay as it is and those who favour allowing a large electricity company to build an offshore windfarm and onshore facility.  She’s also being used as a pawn in a bitter personal rivalry.  Coming to her aid is Cal McGill, a young oceanographer who runs a detective agency tracing how bodies and objects move with the wind and currents, who is in Poltown to talk to a local beachcomber about his finds.  As Anna pushes on with her quest, those with secrets to hide move against her.

The first Cal McGill book, The Sea Detective, was one of my reads of the year so far.  I therefore had high expectations for The Woman Who Walked into the Sea.  In many ways it is quite a different kind of book.  The pace is much slower, the narrative is dominated by long descriptive passages that, for my tastes, are too much show and not enough tell, and nearly the entire story takes place in and around one village.  Whereas the first book had a set of intersecting storylines and a relatively large cast of characters and rivalries, this book is more circumscribed and the focus is for the most part follows Anna, the daughter of the woman who walked into the sea, rather than Cal.  In fact, there is very little sea detection in the story.  Given the amount of work that Douglas-Home does in providing the back story to the tale and setting up the end play to the book it concludes quite quickly and linearly, reliant on a couple of coincidences and underplays the possibilities for dramatic tension or twists and turns.  Personally, I would like the next book in the series to focus more on Cal McGill and his sea detection and to have the same faster-paced storytelling style as the first book.  Overall, a solid, okay read, but in my view not in the same class as the excellent first book in the series.

Review of The Sea Detective by Mark Douglas-Home (2011, Sandstone Press)

Cal McGill is a part-time PhD oceanography student charting how the currents move free-floating objects, supplementing his studies by running Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations, which seeks to track and source particular items such as nets and oil spills for a variety of agencies.  He has a particular interest in charting the movement of bodies, seeking the location where his grandfather may have been washed ashore on the Norwegian coast in the Second World War.  He’s also a part-time eco-warrior, highlighting the issue of climate change by planting a particular, symbolic plant in the gardens of senior Scottish government figures.  Only on his latest escapade he’s been caught on camera.  DI David Ryan, a misogynist and careerist cop, would like to throw the book at Cal, but nobody else wants to press charges, least of all the politicians, wary of how it will play out in the media.  Nonetheless Cal and photographs of his work and his grandfather appear in several newspapers.  The story is seen by an Indian girl on the run from her pimps, who recognises a photo of her friend who’d disappeared three years earlier pinned to his map, and also prompts Cal’s ex-wife to make contact to tell him she’s making a documentary about the remote island where his grandfather used to inhabit and that she’s met an old woman who’d like to talk to him.  The first sees him drawn into the dark world of sex trafficking, the latter prompts him to confront his grandfather’s past and the rumours surrounding his death.  Meanwhile, Ryan and his put-upon, overweight colleague, Helen Jamieson, has been assigned to investigate the appearance of three feet that have been washed up onto different beaches.  Ryan sees it as a path to promotion, but refuses to use Cal’s expertise and wants Jamieson to do all the work whilst he builds his media profile.  Jamieson is fed-up of being bullied by her obnoxious boss and wants to claim the credit of solving the case, and has no issues with using Cal on the quiet.  Drawn into these various strands, the sea detective will either drown or steer a path through stormy currents. 

The Sea Detective is a hugely enjoyable read, told in an engaging and compelling voice.  An awful lot happens in its 280 pages, with its three main intersecting plot lines, but at no point does the story feel overcomplicated or underdeveloped or overly contrived.  Packing so much in, in terms of historical, social and scientific contextualisation and the back stories of the various characters, whilst keep the story front and centre without the text becoming bloated or preachy is a remarkable feat.  The characterisation is excellent, especially the lead characters of Cal McGill, DC Helen Jamieson, Basanti, and DI Ryan, who all are complex and three-dimensional (I especially liked Jamieson as the intelligent but overweight cop who craves recognition and acceptance, but is misjudged and mocked by her colleagues).  Douglas-Home is particularly good at framing and playing out a scene and the interactions between characters.  There is a strong sense of place throughout, especially with respect to rural, coastal Scotland.  The plotting is, in my view is exceptional, creating a story that hooks the story in and incessantly tugs them along on a gripping, emotional journey.  Overall, an excellent first novel that I’d thoroughly recommend.  I’ll definitely be reading the next in the series.