I just want detectives to kiss (& maybe solve crimes if they get around to it)

or, why you need to be reading Jane Casey's Maeve Kerrigan series

I saw Jane Casey - Irish-born, London-based crime goddess - at an event before I ever read any of the books, though her name was on my radar (she has also published YA fiction). It was in the early days of my crime-loving ways (reading-wise, not practical-endeavour-wise) – I think she was on a panel with Liz Nugent, whose dark fucked-up families I’d been drinking up. The domestic suspense side of crime was really what pulled me in, the psychological thrillers with often-untrustworthy typically-female narrators, in that post-Gone Girl era (I had a serious braincrush on Megan Abbott and was about to get hooked on Laura Lippman). I had little time for the police procedural variety, although private investigators might be okay (they had usually left the police force under a dark cloud, they were haunted outsiders, it was all cool).

Anyway, there was talk of some guy Derwent and the audience seemed to dissolve into a swoon of the kind you’d expect to see in a Victorian melodrama, smelling salts on the way, et al. I had no idea what was going on. I was there for Liz Nugent’s strangely-relatable sociopaths! Who had time for members of the police force? Fuck the cops, amirite?

I am still less likely to pick up a police procedural when the crazy-unreliable-bitches variety of book is available to me, for reasons ranging from ‘while I think arguing for abolition of all police forces is interesting theoretically but in practice troubling and can we have some nuance please, I still do not particularly want to read about people who have access to force against civilians and often misuse it’ to ‘seriously there are fourteen books in this series that is too big an investment of my time, give me my standalone thrillers please’. If I do, it’s probably by an Irish woman writer (shoutout to Gill Perdue here).

But then we have Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series. And. Like. OBSESSED. I AM OBSESSED. I think – the specific details have been lost to the mists of time – but I think what happened was I read one of the later ones, just, y’know, to see if it was my kind of thing. Possibly also I had run out of Catherine Ryan Howard titles to inhale (a fabulous example of doing brilliant standalone titles). Who was this tough-yet-vulnerable detective Maeve Kerrigan, working for The Establishment and being ambitious but also – ooh – kind of also being a complicated woman in a mostly-male environment and having thoughts on it and being around other complicated, interesting, flawed women? Was this… a feminist text? Surely I was obliged to read, like, all of the other books. Immediately. For feminism!

Also there was her boss, or immediate superior if not full-on boss, Josh Derwent (had I heard that name before?). What a prick. What a brooding, problematic prick. What an utter – oh, hello there, secret heart of gold, and smouldering sexual tension practically setting the pages alight. Did I want to do bad things to him or cheer Maeve on as she did them? Who cared, I was smitten.

The characters – not just these two will-they-won’t-they eejits, but the supporting cast, particularly their colleagues – felt real and alive in a way that does not always happen with procedural-style fiction, which has a whole lot of other things to do – tons of information to be conveyed, and satisfyingly tangled plots, for example. (And of course it does happen with much of it, but it’s a risk you take going in, in the same ways that there are kinds of fantasy or sci-fi where the technical details about the world will take up huge chunks of the book, or how there are romance books where you need to simply not think about the implausibility of the cute entanglement the leads have got themselves into. And flimsy characterisation is not necessarily going to ruin a book if the plot is so propulsive you hardly care. Robert Langdon is a symbologist with a Mickey Mouse watch, is what I can tell you after five Dan Brown thrillers. The level of cool, intriguing, conspiracy-theory stuff he gets drawn into is compelling enough.)

Also, I just really wanted them to kiss. I worry sometimes about how much of my reading, and viewing, seems to depend on yearning for this type of connection between the characters, as though romantic or sexual love is somehow the only valid ‘elixir’ a hero on their journey might end up with. Aren’t there other important paths, and other kinds of love or belonging we might value? (That in real life I do, of course, value, like the rest of us.) And even if I understand that romantic love is so often linked to other kinds of moral choices in fiction – it’s not just who you want to be with, it’s the kind of person you want to be – is it not still troubling to have so much emphasis placed on this one form of connection with a single other human being?

Then mostly I get over myself and go back to hoping the fictional characters will have shenanigans. Like Maeve and Josh. Will they, won’t they? And then, particularly after, say, sexy hair-washing scenes, or painkiller-induced declarations of love, or having to pose as a couple on an undercover assignment: WHEN will they? Going back to the beginning of the series lets you see both the development of their relationship (frustration, mutual respect, a few life-or-death scenarios for either or both) as well as Maeve’s journey through a system not quite built for her – and that refers to the police force as well as the wider world, where the horrible things that happen to women are, as is so often the case, a huge part of the storyline. (The fact that crime fiction lets the bad guys be caught makes reading it reassuring rather than anxiety-inducing; female readers know bad things can and do happen all the time.)

I read the books mostly for the (hope of) romance, if I am being entirely honest, but when I recommend them, I note that actually there are really compelling, knotty mysteries at the heart of each one. Sometimes there may even be a mystery that involves the characters themselves, or that requires them to confront aspects of themselves; other times the dangers in their personal lives go hand-in-hand with their official jobs. The level of detail we get is believable and handled with skill – it’s a heightened but plausible version of real detective work. (There is, for example, a guy in the office who loves looking at surveillance footage – an incredibly time-consuming job that can often yield nothing. But the boring work is being done, we are reminded, and there are limitations in terms of what can be done legally, and/or consequences for moments where someone might step over the line. The fact that some London police officers have traditionally evaded consequences is also raised, which lends to the realism.)

The twelfth volume of the series (there are also a few novellas out there), The Secret Room, comes out in April; review copies are out in the world and as is often the case with twisty mysteries, early readers have been asked to avoid plot-specific spoilers. The previous instalment, A Stranger In The Family, left us on a cliffhanger, with a phone call having just been received. We don’t jump to that immediately – instead we see Maeve and Josh, who have been trying to avoid working together, brought back into one another’s orbit by a strange murder in a fancy hotel. It’s a classic locked-room mystery, with a dead woman lying in a bath so hard that her skin’s begun to detach from her bones (Casey may give us sizzling sexual tension but she does not shy away from the gory details or the darker sides of human nature). Quickly it becomes clear the victim had been having an affair, but the obvious candidates – the husband, the boyfriend – have alibis. Time to delve into her life and figure out who might have been involved – letting Maeve use her brilliant investigative skills and letting her younger colleague Georgia (who I adore, and who has a novella of her own) half-help and half-hinder, in her typical fashion.

It's only when that investigation is underway that we get the spanner thrown in the works – that phone call happens, and it affects Maeve both personally and professionally. The stakes are high, as one would expect from book twelve in a series, particularly when there’s going to be a break before future titles are published. (From the back cover: It's no longer will-they-won't-they - this is a matter of life and death.)

I will not say (type) much more beyond I HAD A LOT OF FEELINGS, which does absolutely need to be in caps, and that I imagine I will be revisiting this book again (perhaps the whole series) so that I can spend more time in this world, with these believable, admirable-but-flawed characters. (And also be able to spot the hints in the twisty-turny plots, if I can remember the reveal, which is one of the great pleasures of rereading books like this.) They are comfort reads in a way that may seem at odds with the often-gruesome, often-bleak portrait of the modern world they paint, but it’s that fairytale thing, isn’t it? That often-mangled Chesterton quote about dragons. It’s not that we didn’t already know the dangers were out there. The stories are about imagining we might be able to fight them, or at least that justice might be served, or that mysteries might be resolved.

And maybe, even, that there might be kissing. Someday!