As the genre demands, the honeymooners' Arizona idyll is fraught with danger. Even as tension mounts, a signature moment of light humour evokes a smile. When his captive asks a hired thug why he's driving her out into the desert, his sharp reply inspires her rueful reflection that she's "in the thrall of a sarcastic kidnapper."
Lane and Frederick Darling are surrounded by marital discord. A visit with Frederick's old colleague the Chief of Police reveals cracks in his marriage. Then at the inn where the Darlings are staying, Lane witnesses a fatal shooting, motivated, we eventually learn, by greed and jealousy.
While the Inspector honeymoons, in King's Cove, Sergeant Ames fumbles his current romance. In the course of investigating a strange murder, he stumbles on some delicate emotional territory that sours his relationship with Tina. Themes of emotionally bankrupt marriage and male violence against women arise again, and evidence turned up in the investigation challenges Ames to face certain uncomfortable realities.
Set in the late 1940s, this novel portrays the immediate post-war period, a time when women enjoyed far less freedom than they do today. Breaking the silence around sexual politics in The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir summarized with brutal clarity. "Man-the-sovereign will protect woman-the-liege." But in exchange for material protection and personal responsibility, she must "forego her liberty and become a thing." Male dominance feeds on female powerlessness.
In sharp contrast to this sad stereotype, the unflappable ex-spy Lane Winslow and her husband demonstrate the health of their newly forged union. In one scene, we see this through an honest discussion of their failings and imperfections. He opens up to her about his mortification at having been '"taken in by a slick, arrogant man.'" She responds by reminding him that in her youth she "wasted years on a man just like that," adding that he should not reproach himself since '"being dazzled and fooled can happen to anybody."'
Unlike many other war veterans, this couple are consciously aware of their demons of memory, and they work at coming to terms. When Lane relates a recurring war nightmare and shares her feelings of guilt about the events that inspired it, she discovers that opening to Frederick's perspective helps her achieve a kind of peace that diminishes the power of the traumatic memory.
In the post-war era, veterans frequently indulged unmanageable rage and guilt by violently lashing out. Women were brutalized, dark-skinned people victimized, and civil power structures echoed pyramid-style military hierarchies with their demand for unquestioning obedience.
For the male antagonists in this story, the ravages of suppressed emotion feed into fits of rage and violence, racist attitudes, and the unhealthy will to power at the expense of other people's rights and freedoms. Tacitly tolerated, the crime of rape saddles women with years of secret shame and self-recrimination.
As her fans have come to expect, Iona Whishaw tells a cracking good story while offering the reader many other satisfactions. Set seventy years in the past, this novel raises issues that remain sadly current as daily news media report on similar social ills.
Fortunately, good stories sustain the soul. Reading about Lane and Frederick gives me hope, and I am heartened by the thought that "the long moral arc swings toward the good." Let us hope that the rise of COVID 19 accelerates the increasingly critical human understanding that we are all one.
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