When Shadows Fall – Neil Lancaster

When I picked up When Shadows Fall (sent to me for review by my friends at HQ/Harper Collins), I was hoping for a serviceable police procedural murder mystery. It’s the sixth book in Neil Lancaster’s DS Max Craigie series, after all – he’s had plenty of practice writing them – and the premise was intriguing. Women falling from their deaths while mountaineering and rock-climbing in the Scottish Highlands; accidents, or something more sinister?

It didn’t start out strong when I counted no fewer than six adverbs (hugely, utterly, widely, etc) on the very first page. Still, I held out hope that it was just prologue jitters and When Shadows Fall would settle in to a better rhythm.

No such luck: When Shadows Fall turned out to be cliched claptrap from start to finish. All the victims – blonde, white women, naturally – are targeted by the murderer because they put their location (where they were going hiking alone in the wilderness) on Facebook. This, in the year of our Lord 2025. The murderer targets these women because he was once abused by a blonde, white woman, too.

Don’t worry, though, there’s a team of cops coming to save the day: all men, save for one thick-as-bricks female constable (who is alternately described as “not hideous” and “a bolshy mare”, and whose only tangible contribution to the investigation is a half-hearted attempt to go undercover as a potential victim that fails spectacularly because she’s not blonde), and one analyst to do all the annoying legwork.

At one point, the analyst (Norma, desexualised to the point of comedy because you can’t have more than one “not hideous” woman around distracting all the men) calls out the boss for the rampant misogyny on display – to which he says “sorry” on the next page, and she says “all good”, and they move on as though sexism has been solved. No one ever apologises to the big boss’s “male secretary” though, who is subjected to constant “get us coffee” and sexual harassment jokes (it’s funny because he’s doing a Woman’s Job, geddit? Ha ha ha?).

I’ll stop there, because honestly I could rant about When Shadows Fall for pages (the heavily pregnant wife painted as an ice-cream-craving shrew, the caricatures of Scottish characters depicted with dialect, three uses of the word ‘wankspangle’, a killer in a chatroom with the username @BitchesDie_Hard, five uses of ‘on it like a car bonnet’, the list is endless). Needless to say, I won’t be seeking out more books from the DS Max Craigie series, and I wouldn’t recommend When Shadows Fall at all.

I do appreciate the opportunity to read it though, so I want to end on a positive note: I liked the dog, Nutmeg, and the unknown off-page diva who scrawled ACAB on the wall of a courtroom holding cell, much to the chagrin of Craigie and co.

Read When Shadows Fall on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)