Books: Murder on the moor: an inspector recalls

A Place of Execution by Val McDermid HarperCollins, pounds 16.99, 416pp: Jane Jakeman cheers on the high-performance crime writer who can only be stopped by P C Plod

VAL MCDERMID is a roaring Ferrari amid the crowded traffic on the crime-writing road. The power conferred by her journalistic experience of real-life murder combines with a finely-engineered complexity of psychological insight. Yet one senses she is not running full out but still changing gears, still searching for the big story. She has already created three successful series featuring different crime-busters: the gay journalist- sleuth Lindsay Gordon, the Manchester policewoman Kate Brannigan, and the Cracker-style criminal profiler Tony Hill. Her latest book is another departure from type: a detailed exploration of the terrible social and emotional consequences of a murder trial.

The theme is highly topical, given recent exposes of unsafe murder convictions and miscarriages of justice. It uses one of the most powerful arguments against capital punishment: that innocent people get hanged.

The point of departure is the disappearance of a child in a remote moorland village in 1963; although her body was never found, her abusive stepfather was found guilty of murder and executed. Now, 35 years later, a woman journalist, Catherine Heathcote (is the ghost of Emily Bronte being invoked?) sets out to re-examine the case.

With the retired inspector originally in charge of the investigation, plus a sidekick who was a junior officer at the time, she sets about interviewing surviving witnesses in the small Derbyshire village where the crime took place. They are faced with a code of silence as impenetrable as that of any Sicilian Mafioso. She is also faced with the sudden and unexplained resistance of the senior policeman. And she has to discover for herself what the early Sixties were like, not in swinging London, but in a remote and traditional community.

McDermid's own sharp reporter's eye succeeds brilliantly in recreating not only the physical world of the Sixties, with Dansette record-players and constant fag-smoking, but something far more difficult to convey: its sexual and psychological atmosphere and authoritarian social structure, with the local lord of the manor still held in considerable awe. Under it all, she makes us movingly aware of the fragility of children, of the patterns of tragedy which underlie those brief paragraphs reporting missing schoolgirls.

Like Reginald Hill, McDermid is a crime-writer capable of holding her own in any company. But A Place of Execution will inevitably be compared to Hill's recent novel On Beulah Height, which also dealt with a long- dead mystery of a missing child in a self-contained northern village. McDermid does not need to fear the comparison; she is a strong enough writer to create her own distinctive world.

But maybe she should abandon the genre of crime thriller which rests on a heavy police presence. McDermid's coppers have always been realistically drawn, but in this novel they are just too good to be true.

As with so many fast cars, it's the plods on point duty who hold things up. Perhaps, next time, Val McDermid will feel her own strength as a writer, and let the throttle rip. If she does, nothing will be able to overtake her.