Book Review- Pop Goes The Weasel

Pop Goes The
Weasel

M
J Arlidge

(Penguin,
2014)

There's a killer stalking the back streets of Southampton, a latter day Jack
the Ripper who preys on men who come to the seedier areas of the city
to indulge their darkest fantasies and live double lives. On the
killer's trail is D I Helen Grace, a troubled detective with a closet
filled with secrets of her own and a boss who wants a result at all
costs.

If you review crime fiction is is inevitable that you end up reading a lot of novels
involving serial killers, probably too many. Certainly enough for
them to start blurring together, so it takes something special to cut
through the haze.

Despite its confusingly cosy sounding title Pop Goes The Weasel is
just such a book. It has all the expected components, a killer
motivated by a twisted take on morality, a damaged cop plagued by top
brass with an agenda and a supremely sleazy media raking through
ruined lives for scandal and sales.

Arlidge rings the changes by making the victims men with the onus on their
moral failings as a motive for murder. This should be less surprising
than it is, Val McDermid used a similar device in The
Mermaid's Singing twenty years
ago. Perhaps we should read this as a reminder that a genre that has
the disruption and restoration of order as its central theme will
always tend towards conservatism.

The setting is brilliantly realised, Arlidge presents Southampton as a
place on the edge of things where the lost and the lonely meet with
sometimes deadly results. A grimy city people pass through rather
than set down roots in with all the inherent sorrow that brings.

The plot occasionally stretches credibility, Arlidge's police officers
tend towards the maverick behaviour of popular television characters
rather than the plodding procedure followed by the real thing. This
is redeemed by an emotional honesty in describing how the lives of
many of the protagonists struggle to escape their wrong beginnings.

This isn't, perhaps, the most original of crime novels, but it is well put
together by a writer with a strong feeling for place and character.
That makes it worth reading and suggests things may develop in more
interesting directions as the series continues.