Detective Fiction

I have a real fondness for detective fiction. It is the only genre I consistently return to in the knowledge that I will almost certainly enjoy it, as long as I pick my authors wisely. I had a phase of avidly reading Patricia Cornwell but her most recent books have been disappointing and I am less keen these days on forensics and violence. I only discovered Robert Goddard about a year ago and have read several of his -- I've just finished this one, Borrowed Time, bought at Cancer Research for 25p. It's a remarkably ingenious story, with a number of astonishing twists, including one on the final page. Goddard writes very well -- intelligent, thoughtful prose -- which is important to me. He is a historian by training, so his books often, though not always, have a historical dimension. This one doesn't, in fact. It starts with a man on a walking tour who meets a beautiful woman on a remote hillside and has a brief, memorable conversation with her. A few days later, returning home, he discovers that she was brutally murdered just hours after their encounter. Unable to forget her and the powerful impression she made on him, he meets her family and becomes involved with them in various ways, all the time hoping to solve the several mysteries that surround her death. Even the arrest of a man for her murder does not satisfy his quest for understanding, and throughout the book different pieces of the puzzle emerge and apparently get solved, and each casts the dead woman in a different light, some of them very odd and disturbing. Often the whole truth seems finally to have emerged, only to be overthrown again a few pages later by some new information or revelations. Fundamentally what the book deals with is the impossibility of really knowing people, even those who seem to be closest to us.