At the opening of The Dead Season, the third book in Christobel Kent’s Sandro Cellini detective series, a corpse lies by a roadside at night in the stultifying Florentine heat, waiting for dawn and discovery. In a few deft paragraphs, Kent captures the atmosphere of a baking hot city where something dark and corrupt is going on. The opening of The Crooked House is very different: a tumbledown house on an Essex estuary, a cold June night. “The tide is beginning to come up, gurgling in its channels, trickling across the mud that stretches inland, flooding the clumps of samphire and marsh grass and buried timbers.” But what the two prologues have in common is the brilliant conjuring of atmosphere: an acute sense that what grips at the start of a story is not just what is about to happen but where and why.
In the crooked house of the title, a 14-year-old girl is hiding in her bedroom as, three floors below, someone is slaughtering her entire family with a shotgun. The description of how Esme ventures downstairs and discovers the corpses of her mother, father, brother and small twin sisters is horrifying while never being gratuitous. It is a trademark of this fine writer that she uses the staples of crime fiction – the heinous act, the bloodied corpse – while retaining a sense that the victims are real people, not just conundrums to be solved. Esme begins the novel as a typical teenager, stomping home after a row with her best friend and hiding in her bedroom; and in a few lines is transformed into the sole survivor of a deadly massacre, cowering in the dark.
Fast-forward a decade, and Esme has a new identity as Alison, a cautious accountant living in a south London bedsit and working at a small publishing house. She is in a relationship with a man 10 years her senior, Paul, a cultured academic who enjoys taking charge and indulging in some rather controlling and ambiguous sex. When Paul tells her he is to be best man at the wedding of an old flame and invites her along, it is with cold horror that Alison realises the wedding is due to take place in Saltleigh, the coastal town where her family were murdered.
There is something a little implausible about Alison agreeing to this return, having a built a new, anonymous life for herself, but this implausibility is the premise for a novel so gripping that, once you get over it, it’s more than worth it. Saltleigh itself is brilliantly portrayed, a small town nursing all manner of secrets. When Alison returns, her hair shorn and wearing glasses, she suspects she is recognised by the inhabitants – and the unease her reappearance engenders in the community is creepily realistic. The childhood friend gone to seed, the pub owner, the smug local doctor: the cast of characters will be familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town and got out fast. There are so many hints dropped about how the community was complicit in the killings that the reader will begin to wonder whether, as in Murder on the Orient Express, they all did it. They didn’t, but when the explanation for their collective sense of guilt comes, it is both convincing and realistic.
Like Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News?, The Crooked House uses the story of the grownup life of a child survivor as a way of exploring the long‑term and devastating consequences of such a massacre, not only for the individual concerned but for wider society. Kent is best known for her Italian crime series, but she is a much better writer than any genre-pigeonholing implies: she has yet to receive Atkinson’s acclaim or sales, but if there is any justice, this novel should bring her both. There are a couple of odd lurches into points of view other than Alison’s that don’t really work, but these are technical infelicities most readers will forgive in return for a spooky, gripping and affecting story.
• Louise Doughty’s latest novel is Apple Tree Yard (Faber). To order The Crooked House for £11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
