Finding a news series you like is one of the great thrills of crime fiction. I love that moment, halfway through book one, when you realize you've found a keeper and click on to the writer’s bibliography to see another half a dozen novels. The flip side, of course, is coming to the end and discovering that the next book is, at best, a year away.
So it was with Jane Casey's series of novels featuring London murder detective Maeve Kerrigan. The Burning, the first book in the series, was published in 2010. I started it in February and this week finished the eighth and penultimate book, Cruel Acts. (This after getting the chronology mixed up and reading the final novel, The Cutting Place, before it, something which annoyed me beyond reason although entirely my own fault.)
And while I read many many other books in the meantime, this series kept drawing me back.
There are two key reasons for that. The first is that Casey delivers cracking plots, full of mystery, menace, action and plenty of twists. At their core they are police procedurals. DC Maeve Kerrigan is a diligent and clever cop. In one of the later books, a superior officer comments that she always finds something that others miss, whether it's re-searching a scene, sifting through phone records or just simply returning again and again to the evidence to find a connection that makes the breakthrough the investigation needs to progress.
And there's an artistry to making this interesting, which Casey has. Sometimes it will be a pair of detectives playing ideas off against one another. Another time it might be an assessment of Kerrigan's own weaknesses or blind spots that leads her in the right direction, or the psychological analysis of a witness or suspect. Whatever it might be, the stories never drift and are kept tense and gripping.
Beyond the core procedural, however, these are real thrillers. Each comes with its own looming sense of foreboding that something terrible is going to happen to someone if Kerrigan and her colleagues cannot win a race against an often invisible enemy. I've listened to six of the nine books on Audible – brilliantly performed by Irish actress Caroline Lennon, who really brings Kerrigan fully to life – usually either while running or driving. On occasion the story has been so riveting that I've added another kilometer or roundabout to see where it's going. On others the tension has been too much and I've had to switch it off. It's a good book that can make you do either of those things.
The second, and perhaps even more important, of the pull factors these books have is the character arc, which changes and evolves through each of the nine novels. And principally that means Kerrigan's development as a police office, as a person and in her relationship with her senior colleague, DI Josh Derwent.
One of the advantages of reading the books in eight months rather than in the decade it took to write and publish them is that it's easier to follow this trajectory, and probably easier to become involved with the character development. Kerrigan begins the series as a somewhat awkward detective, desperate to prove herself in a high-flying murder squad. Her physical presence – she is tall and apparently beautiful – is both help and hindrance, making her more noticeable than she might like and therefore a target for what in 2010 might still have passed for 'banter', but which is more likely now to be recognized as misogyny and bullying.
She's also smart and, outwardly at least, confident in her opinions and capabilities which further inflames her situation on occasion. Her development as a police officer is cleverly handled as she becomes more confident and self-assured and more likely to take investigations down interesting avenues. With this also comes a stubbornness that manifests itself in an unwillingness to back down or seem weak, which can lead her into both danger and conflict with Derwent, who shares some of those characteristics.
The relationship between Kerrigan and Derwent is the glue that holds the series together. In less capable hands than Casey's this would play out through the predictable device of will they-won't they sexual tension. And while there is a continual hint of this lurking on the fringes of the story, the relationship is far more complex than that, to the extent that even Maeve, from whose perspective the stories are told, struggles to understand it. Derwent, a colleague reminds Maeve in Cruel Acts, has “no boundaries”, and is constantly interfering in her life and career. But for the most part this goes only one way and on his own life, the shutters are kept largely closed, giving an imbalance in the relationship.
It all adds up to a very impressive nine book body of work, on a par with the best of twentieth century police fiction. And by the end of The Cutting Place it certainly did not feel like a series that had run its course, although readers may have a while to wait for book 10 as Casey published her first standalone novel, The Killing Kind, in 2021 (that I'm reading now). An interview Casey gave to Her magazine in Ireland suggested there might be a 10th instalment next year. Let us hope so.