An “excellent,” darkly-told crime novel in the tradition of Tana French and Ian Rankin (Wall Street Journal). Sergeant Alexandra Cupidi is a recent transfer from the London metro police to the rugged Kentish countryside. She’s done little to ingratiate herself with her new colleagues, who find her too brash, urban, and — to make matters worse — she investigated her first partner, a veteran … first partner, a veteran detective, and had him arrested on murder charges.
Now assigned the brash young Constable Jill Ferriter to look after, she’s facing another bizarre case: a woman found floating in local marsh land, dead of no apparent cause. The case gets even stranger when the detectives contact the victim’s next of kin, her son, a high-powered graphic designer living in London. Adopted at the age of two, he’d never known his mother, he tells the detectives, until a homeless womanknocked on his door, claiming to be his mother, just the night before: at the same time her body was being dredged from the water.
Juggling the case, her aging mother, her teenage daughter, and the loneliness of country life, Detective Cupidi must discover who the woman really was, who killed her, and how she managed to reconnect with her long lost son, apparently from beyond the grave.
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Salt Lane is taut, terrifying, and timely; the emotional tension never slackens.
William Shaw is one of the great rising talents of UK crime fiction. This is his best book to date, instantly engaging, beautifully written with really well observed and rounded characters.
A perfectly paced police procedural with twists and turns weaving between the personal and professional life of the protagonist Sgt Alex Cupidi. Highly recommended.
Gritty, hard-hitting crime rarely sits beside brooding atmosphere, flawless writing, and characters so real you could have a chat with them, but Salt Lane is that rare gem.
Before I started to read this book I felt a mixture of excitement and reticence. I had absolutely adored The Birdwatcher, a standalone in which we first meet the character of DS Alexandra Cupidi. Now she is back in her own series (there is no need to read The Birdwatcher before this. But it’s such a great book that I suggest you treat yourself at some point). For me, there were fears Salt Lane would lack the same incredible, intense sense of place that had dominated so vividly The Birdwatcher, where the landscape had become a brooding character. Would William Shaw be trying to recapture that in Salt Lane, and in doing so simply write a poorer, more watered down version? Worse, would he know better than to even attempt that, and instead simply ignore the eerie landscape of fens, ditches and stark beaches, haunted by birds and wildlife, and shadowed by the towers of Dungeness power station?
Instead the author did something incredible. He created a book that combines fast-paced thrills, alongside sometimes claustrophobic stillness. He has enough of the landscape to create incredible atmosphere, and adds light touches of it here and there within scenes, so that it weaves in and out of the story yet is no longer dominant. In other words, he gets it exactly right for this intelligent and slightly different detective series.
At the heart of the series is DS Alexandra Cupidi. She is that classic mix of toughness and frailty that is familiar in popular female detectives of fiction. She is no cliché though. We meet her whole family: mother and daughter, and they all share that brittle, hard-to-get-to-know shell, yet the author gives us wonderful glimpses behind the exterior. Enough to make the reader want more, and to make us keep coming back. I found myself really warming to them.
This is an intelligent crime novel. There is social commentary within the storyline, as it tackles drugs, mental health, immigration, homelessness and the gig economy, but it doesn’t beat itself on the chest. As for the crime itself, it is quite rare for me to read the solution, sit back, and say: now that was clever. I did this time – and that’s all I’ll say about that, for fear of spoilers.
Salt Lane is a fabulous start to what I’m sure will be a must-read series. William Shaw’s writing, plotting, and sense of light and shade, of when to rush and when to pause, are faultless. I’m totally sold. I strongly suggest you read it, and find out for yourself.
William Shaw (The Birdwatcher) takes us back into the marshlands around Kent where DI Alexandra Cupidi is getting comfy with her new team a year or so after leaving the hustle and bustle of the Met.
She’s another grisly case to crack when bodies start plogging the lanes in the marshes, all while breaking in a rookie DC and juggling the teenage foibles of daughter Zoë.
Shaw paints the Kentish coast in an age-old battle of sea versus sewer (as in seamstress) – the name given those who build the drains that salvage land from the ocean.
Salt Lane rewards the reader with a ripping yarn, a worthy mystery and a fair bit of lore on what it takes to beat back the ocean.