I’ve never been to Peterborough. In fact, I’d never even heard of the place until I’d read Eva Dolan’s gripping debut crime novel, Long Way Home.
Peterborough is the setting of Long Way Home, a suburban satellite town the Internet says is in the heart of rural East England. I won’t lie, Dolan’s novel didn’t exactly rocket the place to the top of my must see list of holiday destinations. But what is the Peterborough Tourism Board’s loss is a gain for lovers of great crime fiction.
Long Way Home opens with the discovery of a corpse of an adult male in the burnt out remains of a backyard shed. John Doe was a migrant farm labourer of Eastern European decent, part of the army of semi-illegal workers who have flooded into the area, with all the resulting problems and social tensions. That makes it a job for the Hate Crimes Unit of the local Peterborough plod, and introduces the two main characters, themselves immigrants, DI Zigic, a third generation Serb living in the town, and his offsider, Ferrier, a young policewoman of Portuguese decent.
The victim had been dosed in lighter fluid, the shed locked from the outside and set on fire, so it was no accident. That’s the only clear-cut part of the case, that and the fact there’s no shortage of possible suspects.… Read more