A Trick of the Light
Ali Carter
£8.99, 400pp, Point Blank
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Like most advice, that to write about what you know is well-meaning but wrong. It’s usually easier and more productive not to be fettered by too much reality, to let the imagination roam where it will. The notable exception, as Ali Carter’s third outing for her amateur sleuth Susie Mahl neatly shows, is the detective story.
Unless you have much to do with crime yourself – and readers of the Catholic Herald are a broad church – this seems at first blush paradoxical. You would think that the little grey cells would have to be in overdrive to devise fiendish mysteries and their perpetrators. Yet in fact, the most satisfying stories, and certainly the most plausible, draw on more-or-less everyday settings and characters, and close observation of those. In British ones, class, and the shame that accompanies it, is usually the prime engine.
