The villain is not strong enough for this gritty thriller

The Herald Scotland

a day ago

Ringwood, £9.99
After only introducing Chief Inspector Frank Dorsey in 2021's Clutching at Straws, creator Charles P. Sharkey has decided that the time is already ripe to wrench him out of his comfort zone and plonk him down in unfamiliar territory. A middle-aged detective most at home in the streets of Glasgow, Dorsey finds himself uprooted and transferred to Glencoe to lead the investigation into the disappearance of student Erin Keenan, who went missing while camping with her boyfriend and another couple.
In the search for Erin, the dismembered body of a Polish woman is discovered, her body parts wrapped in a blue home-made dress, years after she went missing. The unearthing of a second body in an identical dress strongly suggests that a serial killer has been operating in the area for a long time, and that Erin may be his latest victim.
Dorsey will spend the next three months out of his element, staying in a Highland hotel cut off from his girlfriend and the son of his first marriage, heading an unfamiliar team and getting nowhere. Sharkey, a criminal lawyer for 30 years, is clearly familiar with the tedium and frustration of investigations that go on for months without any breakthroughs.
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Dorsey follows leads that turn out to be dead ends, sets up roadblocks that prove ineffective and spends a large part of the force's budget on DNA testing that returns no useful results. While press and public are turning against the police for their lack of progress, Dorsey is working up to 14 hours a day, relying on whisky and cigarettes to get through it, well aware that his deteriorating physical condition is becoming hard to ignore.
Picking Daisies (Image: PA)
While that may be true to the complexities and fruitless box-ticking of real police work, the downside is that, for quite a long time, Picking Daisies feels a little like it's spinning its wheels – not exactly short on incident, just not the kind that nudges us closer to a solution. The friends who were the last to see Erin Keenan alive, for instance, and might have useful input, are conveniently absent from the narrative for a surprisingly long stretch.
Sharkey makes effective use of his location, casting the Highland countryside as a bleak, alienating and treacherous environment which harbours gruesome secrets and where people can vanish without warning. That sense of unease can rapidly be fanned into visceral horror: the imprisonment and torture of women is a prominent feature, and pathologist Dr Jamali really earns her keep, examining chopped-up body parts that have been lying for years in stagnant water, and attending one scene near the end which shouldn't be described in a family newspaper.
However, despite leaving such a trail of carnage, the villain of the piece is ultimately underwhelming. He's seen at the very beginning, living in an isolated and dilapidated farmhouse with tell-tale signs of human butchery in the barn, an obsessive, traumatised loner running up very specific dresses in which to clothe his victims. Sharkey acknowledges the inevitable comparisons with The Silence of the Lambs in a line of dialogue, but that's not enough to head off charges that the antagonist is a thinly-sketched version of the kind of killer who was new and shocking 30 years ago but struggles here to transcend his tropes and make it as a fully-realised character.
It's a good procedural, but for a book that otherwise takes care to make us believe in its cast (minor character PC Dixon arguably makes a bigger impression) Picking Daisies deserved a more substantial villain.