Review The Shadow Collector

The Shadow Collector

Kate Ellis

(Piatkus, 2013)

Lilith Bentley, rumoured to be a witch and implicated in a horrific murder returns to her smallholding, the appropriately named Devil’s Tree Cottage, after eighteen years in prison. On the neighbouring farm a gaggle of c-list celebrities gather for a reality show and in the cellar of a nearby house several sinister wax dolls are discovered. When a young woman’s body is found on a neighbouring farm DI Wesley Peterson must uncover dark secrets in order to bring her killer to justice.

In her seventeenth Wesley Peterson novel Kate Ellis touches on tropes that will be familiar to readers of what is sometimes patronisingly described as ‘cosy’ crime fiction. These include the long shadows cast by old crimes, the tensions within a closed community and a faint hint of the supernatural.

This isn’t, perhaps, the most original of novels, Ellis found a modestly traditional furrow for herself and has been ploughing it with determination for years. This is not an attempt to belittle her talents, she does so with narrative skill and a strong sense of place and history. Peterson, for all his stolidity, is refreshingly free of the angst and addictions that make so many fictional detectives tediously tortured.

Kate Ellis’s books may not be the most original in the genre, but they do manage to reliably deliver the satisfying slug of criminality you expect from a traditional British mystery novel.