August 12, 2013
The occult collides with police procedure in Guttridge’s fragmented, patchwork fourth Brighton mystery (after 2011’s The Thing Itself). A huge wicker man is burning on the Brighton seaside. Performance art? Unfortunately no. There’s a body within the wicker frame, and Sarah Gilchrist, newly promoted to acting detective inspector, teams with young but highly knowledgeable Constable Bellamy Heap to find whodunit. Heap’s bottomless knowledge of pagan arcana comes into continual use as more perplexing events hit the town: a vicar has disappeared, his flat vandalized with a pentagram; a painting called The Devil’s Altar is stolen from the Brighton Museum; and satanic books are missing from the library. Routine questioning of eccentric locals finds a rich vein of New Age spirituality mixed with black magic. Meanwhile, former Chief Insp. Bob Watts begins a parallel investigation on his own and learns more about Templars, Walpurgisnacht, and toxic plants than he or the reader really wants to know.
October 1, 2013
Brighton, England, is home to a number of offbeat religions, including a group of devil worshipers. Sarah Gilchrist has been recently reinstated and promoted after a spot of trouble. While Sarah and Kate Simpson, a radio producer who landed her flatmate in the soup when she killed a man with Sarah's weapon, are recovering from a bout of food poisoning they picked up at Brighton's premier natural foods restaurant, they become fascinated by the burning of a Wicker Man figure on the beach. The remains of a body are found inside the wicker statue, and a local vicar has vanished, leaving behind a room filled with mystical artifacts he presumably hoped would shield him from the devil. In the meantime, disgraced ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts, whose brief relationship with Sarah put paid to his marriage, is cleaning out his late father's home. His father was a well-known novelist whose friends included not only Ian Fleming, but several occult writers who inscribed their books with cryptic messages to him. On a visit to Colin Pearson, one of these authors, Watts learns about Saddlescombe Farm, the estate where Pearson lives with his odd wife, Avril. At one time, Saddlescombe was held by the Knights Templar, and it's still widely believed to contain some of their well-hidden secrets. The plot is thickened by several rare manuscripts that have recently been stolen, a painting called The Devil's Altar and a sudden surge in activity related to the Old Religion. Sarah's effort to untangle all this strange criminal behavior is enhanced by her erudite new constable, and they soon cross paths with Watts as he tries to uncover the secrets of his father's hidden past. Guttridge's fourth dispatch from Brighton features many of the same characters as the first three (The Thing Itself, 2012, etc.) but is more cerebral and slower paced. In its own different way, however, it's just as literate and exciting.
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August 1, 2013
Live fish falling from the sky in the opening pages signal a sea change for Guttridge. After the gritty noir of his lauded Brighton trilogy, his fourth Brighton mystery, with its returning cast of characters, takes a turn toward the occult. Newly promoted Detective Inspector Sarah Gilchrist is working the case of the Wicker Man, burned at dawn on the beach and found to contain human remains. At the same time, disgraced ex-chief constable Robert Watts is tracking down mystifying inscriptions by noted authors in books owned by his late father, a thriller writer. Meanwhile, a young vicar disappears, magic items are stolen from museums, and herbalism is taken to new heights. Brighton is the California of England, with no trend too weird, as Gilchrist notes, and nearby Saddlescombe Farm is a former Knights Templar site and reputed source of power so Dan Brown, as Watts remarks. But readers expecting hard-hitting crime fiction may be impatient with pages of Templar history, despite Guttridge's well-wrought prose, an appealing new character in Constable Bellamy Heap, and a deadly climax reuniting former colleagues.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)