Review: Where Roses Fade

Where Roses Fade by Andrew Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Young Mattie Harris is found floating in the river by Jimmy Leigh, a slow-witted young man. Mattie was a waitress at the local cafe, but her death has got the old men of Lydmouth closing ranks. Detective Superintendent Ray Williamson has come out of retirement due to ill-health to manage the investigation and he appears determined to pin the murder on Jimmy, even if the evidence seems to point somewhere else - could it be the Masonic lodge is covering something up?

In addition, Mattie's best friend Violet has recently given birth to a baby out of wedlock, the father Ray, is the son of one of Lydmouth's most prominent citizens and he and his best friend Malcolm, who was struck down by polio as a child and now has to walk with the assistance of crutches, have been using a deserted house for their own purposes ... was Mattie somehow involved.

I'm devouring this series so I'm not doing much analysis, but what I like are the references to issues of the time, eg Malcolm's polio, the criminality of homosexuality (and the pain that caused people), the sin of childbirth outside marriage, and the hypocrisy of prostitution. When people hark back to the golden era of the 1950s they should remember how repressed society was and how so many people had to live a lie, or just unhappily, just because of society's diktat.

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