FROM THE ASHES

Deborah Masson

(Penguin, £8.99)

 

Deborah Masson brings her Aberdeen-based copper DI Eve Hunter back for a third novel, a crime thriller which explores the damage that can be done to children in the care system, and its long-term consequences.

In the early hours of a March morning – Eve Hunter’s birthday, in fact – a fire is deliberately started in the Wellwood children’s home in the suburb of Kincorth, to the south of Aberdeen. All inside escape with their lives, except one: 11-year-old Lucas Fyfe, whose body is found in an unused basement. The staff and children have only known of the basement’s existence for a few weeks, and have no idea what Lucas was doing down there at the time of the fire. Firefighters also find an oil drum plastered with chemical waste stickers that looks like it’s been there a long time.

The loss of the young boy’s life sends shockwaves rippling across Aberdeen, and Hunter knows that she and her team will have to investigate with care and sensitivity as they deal with vulnerable children, a horrified public and journalist Marcie Wade, who is “tailing them like a sniffer dog”. To their dismay and outrage, they find that Lucas’s grandmother is coldly indifferent to the news of her grandson’s death, and his father’s first thought is how he can make money out of the tragedy by suing the home.

One of her officers, however, is not participating in the investigation as diligently as he should. On the morning of the fire, DC Scott Ferguson witnesses a young man being hit by a van and accompanies him to hospital, where he is put in an induced coma for several days. Ferguson feels a personal connection to the homeless youth, and not just because he happened to be there when the accident occurred. The young guy, whose name turns out to be Archie, reminds him of a younger version of himself, although explaining why would mean dredging up memories he’d prefer to keep buried. Ferguson’s reluctance to pull his weight in the Wellwood fire investigation, preferring to sit by Archie’s bedside and follow up clues to his identity, stirs up some resentment amongst his colleagues.

Hunter, the nominal star of the series is comparatively quite sketchily defined. Readers of the previous two novels will no doubt know her quite well by now, but in From the Ashes she takes a back seat to her colleagues, particularly Ferguson. As the book opens, she knows she has a difficult day ahead as it’s the anniversary of the day her mother revealed to her that she was the product of rape, and that she had no idea who Eve’s father was. Beyond that, we don’t get a very strong sense of Hunter as a character, other than that she’s a disciplined but caring boss who likes to escape from the pressures of her job by fixing up furniture in her shed.

We do, however, learn a lot about Wellwood’s early days, in flashbacks to a nameless boy whose attraction to a newly-arrived resident conflicts with how his unfit mother had conditioned him to feel about women, and who will provide the key to the mystery, though not necessarily in the way we expect.

Danger threatens from an unexpected source, and there are inevitable plot-twists to be negotiated, but it’s her concern for children in care that seems to have motivated Masson throughout the writing of this well-plotted police procedural, which focuses on the dysfunctional families they came from, the opportunists who exploit their misfortune and the enduring ties that bind them to each other.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT