Women’s deaths in Highlands no accidents

After reading Neil Lancaster’s When Shadows Fall, you’ll never be so glad that Winnipeg is flat.

Fall off Garbage Hill? You might roll down a ways, you might smell, but you’re not going to plummet dozens of metres from narrow trails onto craggy, unforgiving Highland rocks.

As do people herein, most of them women — women of certain characteristics, of a certain appearance.

Let’s not go any further without clearly understanding just how hard When Shadows Fall is to read at times.

Misogyny doesn’t even begin to cover just how vile the men are who are involved in the murders.

They hate women. They hate women so much that they want them to die in terror.

They want to watch.

There comes a point when one of the women police detectives rips a senior male officer up one side and down the other for being so keen to get stuck into an intriguing investigation, oblivious to the devastating impact these deaths will have for a very long time on the women trying to stop the killings.

Is When Shadows Fall a good police procedural? Oh yes, very much so. But it’s so much more than that.

It’s the sixth murder mystery featuring detective sergeant Max Craigie from former police detective turned author Neil Lancaster. Craigie was special forces in war zones, he’s haunted by memories of improvised explosive devices and by killing a villain in London.

And his wife is close to giving birth, torn by doubts where she and the baby will stand compared to Max’s job.

Craigie gets a tip from an old military mate who’s now a pilot in mountain rescue (the book is an ode to those daring heroes). There have been too many accidental deaths throughout the Highlands, especially fatal falls by women, he reckons, yet they all look like accidents and overburdened, underfunded police are satisfied just to close the files as misadventure.

Not so our Max.

Craigie and his eclectic crew sleuth, and through the force of their delightful personalities begin piecing together what starts as a demented killer, and becomes — well, horrendous doesn’t begin to describe it.

Does every police maverick have at their beck and call a computer genius who bathes less frequently than others in the vicinity might wish, who speaks an impenetrable IT language while straying far beyond the law to unearth the secrets of the dark web? Police whodunits would suggest so.

Suffice to say that there may be a bent copper afoot. Maybe more than one. And what they’re doing…

Lancaster has a way with both dialogue and dialect. He makes F-bombs sing as they flow from the ribald tongues of a bunch of somewhat outside-the-norm folk dedicated to justice, each in their own spectacularly peculiar way.

When Shadows Fall is a hard book to read, but gripping and nail bitingly mysterious, that it is.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin loves hiking, but he’s always been on a strained relationship with open heights — railings, please, and no, he won’t be peeking over the edge.