There is dark humour
and if you are looking for a light thriller, maybe this one will work well.
(Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Back in the uncertain days of the 1930s which were hailed as the heyday of the “queens of crime”, crime writing was a genre which offered a certain sort of comfort: the guilty were caught and punished and at the end, order was restored.
Times are uncertain again now, but crime writing has changed. There’s the hard-boiled, violent genre and there’s the cosy genre, but in both you can never be quite sure of an ending which will put everything back in place – and guilt is no longer so easily defined.
A Good Place to Hide a Body is an example of this. Laura Marshall’s novel opens with middle-aged divorcee and anxious mother Penny getting a phone call from her frantic elderly parents – there is a body in their garden. So she rushes round to them and indeed there is, and no-one is quite sure how to proceed except that it would be wise not to do what one is expected to do and call the cops.
We then are taken back three months. At that point, Penny’s parents, short of money, decided to let their downstairs annexe to a tenant. Penny came along to meet the potential renter – an attractive middle-aged man who seemed to be a perfect fit, in more ways than one. Of course, it turns out that he is bad news, but not before Penny has got herself into a difficult position, which also means that she is neglecting her son, unhappy in his first term at university and smoking a lot more weed than is good for him. Things begin to spiral out of control.
We soon catch up with the beginning of the book and learn the identity of the corpse and how, and why, it is in the garden. The situation escalates quickly (and it must be said, fairly improbably). The author builds tension quite skilfully, though from early on what is going to happen is pretty obvious. Characterisation is rather slight, and Penny is not a particularly appealing narrator and her naivety is not quite believable. Some of the events are also very unlikely indeed – once the police get involved you have to question their gullibility as well. But the denouement is genuinely surprising, and Marshall does delve into the matter of what is guilt, and whether degrees of guilt can justify certain actions.
There is dark humour and if you are looking for a light thriller, maybe this one will work well. - Margaret von Klemperer
A Good Place to Hide a Body is published by Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-1-399-72963-5