Book Review: Beneath The Ashes

Beneath The Ashes

Jane Isaac

(LegendPress, 2016)

A young woman wakes up on the kitchen floor, the house she’s in has been broken into and her boyfriend is missing. In the burnt- out shell of the barn lies an
unidentified body. This Is the starting point for a case involving long hidden
secrets that will embroil DI Will Jackman and his team in a race to stop
another murder being committed to settle an old score.

The police procedural is sometimes seen as the bargain option in the crime genre, it delivers what readers want but with more familiarity than flair. Jane Isaacs is part of the select group of writers capable of lifting it above the stolid
norm.

In her hands what might have been commonplace material is transformed into the sort of solidly functional storytelling where not a single word goes to waste. The characters are well rounded and the Warwickshire setting brilliantly realized, moreo the point she keeps the tension throughout.

In Jackman she has created a series character with an interesting back-story, but, thankfully, not afflicted by the sort of demons that would make him just another cliché.

If the people who commission Sunday night television series are looking for crime
stories that deliver everything fans want without inhabiting a comfort zone
marked ‘gritty realism', but isn’t anything of the sort, then they need look no
further than Jane Isaac's excellent novels.