With harsh working conditions, violent gangmasters and squalid lodgings, the irony is that they seek the dull quotidian that eats away at Manon. Manon’s world is a stark contrast to the grim milieu of the migrant Lithuanians.
As she tells a friend’s errant husband: “Marriage is a shit-show and you’d better start learning a way to navigate it.” There’s the constant fatigue of the work-life balance, the soul-draining tedium of household chores and arguments – plus she’s struggling to keep the relationship with her partner Mark alive, knowing that cold comfort might be the best they can expect. This time Manon is investigating the death by hanging of a Lithuanian migrant worker, but her life away from the job is where the real trouble is.
Remain Silent is the third in a series featuring this formidable Fenland sleuth, a wide-hipped, loose-lipped realist who cares little for others’ approval and admires “women who command the room and who don’t succumb to all the appearance bullshit”. But at a time so closely focused on the vicissitudes of home life, DI Manon Bradshaw of Cambridgeshire Constabulary is on hand to examine the existential mystery of domesticity. W hat kind of crime fiction suits the mood of the lockdown? There’s a limit to how mean the streets can get when walked down in dutiful daily exercise sparse clues to be found when everyone is taking strict precautions like seasoned serial killers.
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