Another modern novel which sounds like it might have an impossible crime at its core, sufficient reason for me to grab a copy — from the library, dear boy, I’m not made of money — and see if it’s worthy of TomCat‘s attention. I get no enjoyment from this whatsoever, you understand. And I do it for free!

The woman known as Anne Pusey has booked room 412 at the upmarket Governor Hotel for a single night every Wednesday for the last ten months. She arrives in the afternoon, meets a man there, and the two have — not to put too fine a point on it — never actually stayed the night. So when she arrives at the Governor one Wednesday in November, goes to the room, and orders a bottle of champagne, no-one thinks any more than the usual. But when her paramour arrives a short while later, he goes up the room and finds Anne Pusey strangled to death and dumped in a bathtub full to the brim with scalding water. And, since the CCTV shows no-one except the waiter who took up the champagne going into the room, and only then for a couple of minutes, and since investigating officers conclude that Sam Blundell could not have killed his lover and set up the scene in the time which he was in the room unobserved…howdunnit?

The Secret Room (2025) by Jane Casey is most successful in the opening 80 pages, setting up this murder which we’re left in no doubt can’t be as simple as it seems:

“It feels impossible but there’s no doubt about the timings — we have her on CCTV all the way through the hotel, as far as her room. I checked with the hotel, and after the chambermaid left the room this morning they have no record of anyone going into that room until [Anne] let herself in at 2.13 p.m. The room has an electronic lock that records every single time it’s opened, and it was securely closed all day. The waiter couldn’t have killed her in a couple of minutes, which is roughly how much time he spent in the room — he was pretty efficient. Apart from him, Sam Blundell is the only person who was in there, so logically it must be him, and he must have managed to do everything in a very short space of time somehow, but I can’t make it work.”

Assigned to the case is DS Maeve Kerrigan and, this being the twelfth book about the character, she comes with a certain amount of baggage that is neatly and organically communicated to new readers across the opening handful of chapters: for one thing, she has a mutual-but-unrequited love for her boss, DI Josh Derwent, who is trapped in a relationship himself with a woman who has a mysteriously ill young son, adding to the complications. Kerrigan is an interesting character, nicely drawn when we first meet her:

Death had arrived just ahead of me, and it greeted me like an old friend, which was fortunate because the welcome from the staff downstairs had been distinctly chilly.

Maeve is intelligent, perceptive, and resourceful in her investigations, and as baffled as everyone else about this murder, and just as these dual threads of impossible bafflement and the horrible situation Derwent is stuck in — his relationship seems pretty loveless, but his partner has sworn he’ll not be allowed to see her son if he ever leaves her — run the risk of becoming intriguing, the book swerves to avoid these elements and gets gummed up in a series of increasingly soapy revelations which cause it to lose focus, purpose, and, for this reader, interest.

Firstly, Derwent — and Maeve almost always thinks of him as ‘Derwent’, rarely ‘Josh’, despite being in love with him — is accused of serious assault on his partner Melissa, who is found beaten and bloody at the bottom of the stars in the house they share. And so the book forgets about the hotel murder and becomes about how this is affecting everyone personally, causing much hand-wringing and people saying things like ‘But do you really know what someone is like?’ until the top is blown off the whole thing and it’s resolved at the halfway point with an answer that was so unconvincing I fully expected it to be a false solution (mind you, I’ve never — rot13 — znavchyngrq fbzrbar vagb orngvat zr jvgu n ont bs benatrf, qrfcvgr gur snpg gung gurl jbhyqa’g yrnir gur fbeg bs znexf gung gur erpvcvrag jnagrq, so what do I know?)

Then everyone remembers that there’s a murder to solve, so they go back to that, and about five-eights of the way through the how of the murder is revealed in a way that, again, I just didn’t believe was going to be the answer. The idea that no-one thought to ask about this or check it seems incredible to me…and, yes, I’ve never run a murder investigation, but c’mon. Then things take a turn into ‘Well, *shrug* suburban marriages’ ground, and eventually it all gets tied up with people knowing things they couldn’t possibly have known if they actually had the sorts of conversations that real people have. Is it normal for a woman to know that (rot13) ure fvfgre’f oblsevarq vf npgvat nf n phpxbyq sbe uvf zvfgerff’ uhfonaq, jub unf fvtarq n cer-ahc juvpu zrnaf fur trgf phg bss sebz ure jrnygul uhfonaq vs fur trgf certanag? Am I just bad at getting people to open up to me? Wow, I have clearly failed at small talk.

At one point, in a development that I’m not sure has anything to do with anything else (I’ll admit to some skipping ahead at this point) one of the police officers gets stabbed. Then we sort of move past it and I don’t think it’s ever referenced again. See what I mean? Soapy.

Despite some occasionally well-written passages, The Secret Room is built more around a sort of pearl-clutching middle class revulsion — Will someone think of the children?!?! — than anything approaching the construction and rigour I’d like in my novels of impossible doings done. Rather like Ian Rankin, the preceding author discussed in this undertaking on this blog, it feels as if Casey is very caught up in the lives of her characters and yet struggles a bit to come up with plots to explore what she wishes them to experience. And, look, I’m full of respect for someone who has written as many books as Casey has, and I never claim to be the final word on anything, so you might read this and get caught up in the undeniably well-drawn dynamics of it all. I, however, shall be looking elsewhere for my modern crime fiction fix.

~