Review: In Place of Fear

In Place of Fear by Catriona McPherson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Helen (Nelly) Crowther and her husband Sandy are living at home with her parents and her sister Teenie in their small apartment in Edinburgh. Having acted as an assistant to Mrs Sinclair (a wealthy do-gooder) during the war, Nelly has studied and become an Almoner (sort of like triage but financially assessing what a patient could pay and then sending them to the appropriate resources) prior to the inception of the National Health Service, now she has accepted a position with a local doctor's practice as the in-house unqualified nurse - basically giving sensible advice about childcare, pregnancy and the like. Nelly is evangelistic about the NHS, albeit as a newly-wed she finds some of the topics she has to discuss a little bit awkward, especially since Sandy hasn't wanted to consummate their marriage since he returned from a PoW camp.

Everything is going well, the dawn of a new era, Doctor Strasser even gives Nelly and Sandy their own apartment which has been recently redecorated and even has its own indoor bathroom. Then Nelly finds the half-naked corpse of a young woman in their Anderson air-raid shelter. In her determination to discover the identity of the woman and the cause of her death, Nelly uncovers some shocking truths about the seedy underbelly of her city (BTW, why do we always say seedy underbelly? Surely we only need to say one or the other).

I have enjoyed Catriona McPherson's other series and so I was delighted to receive an ARC of this new book, which is very different from those series, albeit still featuring a Scottish protagonist (and yes I know that Dandy is actually an Englishwoman living in Scotland).

I'm halfway through this review and I still haven't assigned a star rating because it is so difficult to think of it as a whole. First, as a working class woman Nelly has a strong Scottish accent which peppers the dialogue (even worse than Dandy Gilver and The Reek of Red Herrings), which can present some challenges to the reader.

Second, the information about the birth of the NHS was fascinating, particularly the way in which people didn't know to what they were entitled, and no-one really knew how it worked. But ... in and of itself it didn't have anything to do with the mystery and was maybe a bit too much of an information dump, as in I've done all this research and I must shoe-horn it into the book.

Similarly, the relationship between Sandy and Nelly and the relationship between Nelly and her family felt superfluous in a way, unless of course this is the start of a new series, although the postscript would indicate that this was a standalone novel.

The mystery, well that was clever. well thought through, no obvious clues being dropped but also no Sherlock Holmes-like deductions from absolutely nothing. All the little snippets were there and came together very cleanly.

Overall, I would say I enjoyed this, the new setting, the mystery, and the characters, there you go I've decided on four stars.

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