Book review - Turnstone

First in the twelve-book series about Detective Inspector Joe Faraday, Turnstone (2000) is an excellent British police procedural novel set in the Portsmouth area. I must admit that I found Graham Hurley’s book fascinating as I read about places familiar to me.

The book begins with a young girl finding her way to the police station to report her father Stuart Maloney missing. At the time, DI Faraday was busy with a drug case.  Something about the misper (missing person) case draws in Faraday, however, and the deeper he digs the more certain he becomes that Maloney is dead.

We get to know detective Paul Winter, a rough nut of the old school who prefers to bend the rules to get a good result, CID sergeant Cathy Lamb, who discovers her husband Peter is being unfaithful, Detective Superintendent Arnold Pollock, Faraday’s boss, ‘a thin intense high-flyer with a Cambridge degree and little time for moral nuances’, and DI Harry Wayte, in charge of the area Drugs Squad, ‘who hid his determination to smash the local drug supply networks behind a robust sense of humour and a bottomless thirst’. Interesting characters, all, drawn with depth and humour.

The local drug lord seems untouchable. Winter’s attempts to get something on him backfire spectacularly and embarrassingly, injecting some humour in an otherwise bleak landscape – a landscape also populated by birds of the feathered variety. Faraday is a bit of a bird enthusiast, and has a vast library on them. He has nurtured his son’s interest in them, too: J-J is now twenty-two, and has been motherless for most of those years, Janna having died when he was an infant. J-J is deaf and the relationship between him and his father is touchingly revealed.

The disappearance of Maloney seems linked to some contestants in the Fastnet race. The Fastnet has claimed several lives over the years, and this year is no exception: some boats capsized and one even sank. The survivors, Faraday feels, are connected to Maloney but are not telling.  

Hurley paints his pictures well: ‘Harry… moved in a world where truth was a currency, traded for favours, distorted for gain, abandoned when plain fiction seemed more plausible. Dealing with junkies, and the suppliers who kept them in their cage, you got to disbelieve absolutely everything, even the evidence of your own eyes. See a man with one head, he probably had two.’ (p207)

The title is word-play. Turnstones are two species of wading bird related to the sandpipers, and frequent the mudflats near Faraday’s home. And of course Faraday leaves no stone unturned to get to the bottom of the misper riddle.

A satisfying read. I look forward to the next eleven books!

'Missing person'

Spanish Eye contains 22 cases from Leon Cazador, half-English, half-Spanish private eye.  It was released on 29 November, from Crooked Cat Publishing.

The vast majority of these cases are based on true events…  The short story ‘Gone Missing’ was first published in magazine format in 2011: here is a very brief excerpt:

Gone Missing

Pavel’s best defence was extreme halitosis…

 

Miguel García Hernandez had been missing a week by the time his wife, Beatriz, got in touch with me. He’d walked out of his apartment in Edificio Donna Ximena, saying that, on his way to work, he was going to drop into the loteria shop to claim his euro reintegro from La Primitiva.

José on the lotto desk knew Miguel as a regular and was adamant that he had not come in that day. Miguel was supposed to go to the La Mata villa of Señor Rafael Morales, to fit a wooden carport in his drive. A three-day job, he’d estimated, but he never arrived.

Beatriz feared something terrible had happened to her dear Miguel and it showed in her sleep-deprived, dark brown eyes and unkempt dyed-black hair. She was in her mid-forties, but seemed older since the clear complexion of her chubby cheeks was mottled after she had dried too many tears.

She’d been quite a catch. Her family had worked in the salt industry since the 1820s. Salt was another word for money in Torrevieja. Beatriz thought that Miguel was the salt of the earth, and she should know. In the middle of last century, Torrevieja was a small fishing village on the southeast coast of Spain that also thrived on “white gold”, salt production. Today, Torrevieja exports a million tonnes annually. Twenty years ago, its population was about 20,000. Now it’s a sizeable city with in excess of 100,000 residents, over half non-Spanish.

*

There is a glossary explaining terms such as 'reintegro' and La Primitiva'...

As can be seen in this clipping from The Coastrider dated July 2007, Torrevieja town has grown over the years – the fastest growing town in Spain, in fact. The numbers have fluctuated since then, but even taking into account the financial crisis of 2008, which meant many hundreds of expats returned to their native countries, the numbers have still increased – in 2012 there were 107,009. Estimates may vary, but when the tourists are added to the number, there are never less than 320,000 inhabitants.

 

Spanish Eye paperback may be purchased post-free worldwide from here

Kindle UK here

Kindle Amazon com here