Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner
D.S. Manon Bradshaw is a highly respected police officer.
She’s part of the Major Incident Team (MIT) of the Cambridgeshire police.
She is 39.
She is single.
After 2 years of internet dating, love has eluded her.
She is alone and an insomniac who falls asleep listening to the “low murmurings about road traffic accidents of drunken altercations outside Level 2 Nightclub on All Saints Passage, all of which she can safely ignore because they are far too lowly for the Major Incident Team,” on an unauthorized police radio on her bedside table.
She is also the creation of former Guardian journalist Susie Steiner in her crime novel, Missing, Presumed, and a welcome addition to the roster of fictional female police officers hailing from Britain. British television in particular has been home to gritty, rough edged women in law enforcement from Helen Mirren’s outstanding performance as Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison to Sergeant Catherine Cawood, brilliantly rendered by Sarah Lancashire in the BBC Series Happy Valley, and Gillian Anderson’s flawless portrayal of the psychologically complex DSI Stella Gibson in The Fall.
Bradshaw is not quite as raw as these women, but she is just as complex. She’s good at her job but she wants more in life and is looking for love. “I found her very easy to create actually” Steiner told me in an email, “I wanted a character who was not cute or perfect, but real and flawed. I think what interested me was someone who needed a person to love (as most of us do) and was therefore vulnerable and needy.”
When a well connected postgraduate student at Cambridge University goes missing, in circumstances that confound, a bloodied broken wine glass, n o forced entry, her car and passport in place, Bradshaw and her team is brought in to investigate.
Missing girl, people around her whose stories don’t seem quite right, important well connected parents breathing down the necks of the police, dangerous ex convict who somehow met the girl, this could have been a standard issue police procedural, jumping on the girls in peril bandwagon that has bombarded the publishing world since the phenomenal success of Gone Girl (and yes, I use the word girl advisedly).
What saves it is Steiner’s writing which is both evocative and elegant, and plotting that twists and turns en route to the conclusion. We watch the investigation from a variety of different viewpoints; Bradshaw and her partner Davy, the girl’s mother and her best friend. These are characters of some depth, they have a back story, they flesh out the book in ways that keep you guessing because of the mystery, but keep you there because they have some dimension.
The mother of the missing Edith Hind could have been a caricature of an aristocratic wife who exemplifies British reserve and lack of emotion. But Lady Miriam Hind is a revelation. An educated woman, a doctor, whose career played second fiddle to her husband’s and whose main job was “household management” as “her own career hadn’t recovered from having the children,” She is trying to remain hopeful while breaking apart inside. After the initial flurry of interest and concern even their well heeled connections in government begin to lose interest in the Hind’s awful circumstance “It seems to Miriam that they have become tainted — the stain of life going wrong, rather like the taint of illness or disability, weight gain, depression, financial difficulty. It has the whiff of not succeeding — not staying sufficiently in control.”
With many well rendered characters it is still Manon Bradshaw who emerges as the anchor for this book. You might have thought you were picking up a police procedural but actually what you get is a story about woman who is a full fledged person not solely defined by her profession. In fact, Steiner says “Manon came first. Her being a policewoman is kind of incidental.”
Steiner’s first novel was about struggling Yorkshire farmers so a switch to crime writing might not seem that obvious. “I wanted a story with more narrative drive, a real page-turner and I wanted to get better at intricate plots and the best way to do that is to write a thriller. The course of a police investigation has a natural narrative arc, and good propulsion” she told me.
Steiner has managed to infuse the propulsive arc with the story of a woman who wants to have more than just the satisfaction of doing a good job, and skillfully weaves together the collision of Bradshaw’s professional commitment with a commitment to herself to overcome her loneliness. It is the quotidien life of togetherness she is seeking, not some epic romance. On a visit to her good married friends Steiner captures that sense of loneliness beautifully “Bryony and Peter move around each other at the counter, a nonchalant ballet of putting forks in the dishwasher, getting out bowls, broccoli steam hitting their faces, caring the meat. And Manon watches them. Isn’t that what she should want? She knows she comes here like the third child, to inhale some of it, to slouch in the soft cushioning of of the corner armchair, where passivity is king. Sometimes she is pricked by jealousy, or at least greed for their kind of life….”
As the investigation unfolds, so does the character of Manon Bradshaw. You get to know her and want to know how things work out for her. Can she achieve some sense of satisfaction in her personal as well as professional life?
Lucky for us Steiner wanted to know more too. So get reading before the next Manon Bradshaw mystery, Persons Unknown, hits the stores this summer.
Before You Read:
Length: 346 pages
Genre: Mystery
Themes: intrigue, thriller, female professional tackling life
Commitment: An absorbing page-turner that flies by.
Photo: Jonathan King
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