River of secrets
An intriguing British tale of family secrets and 'floaters'

“The Black Highway,” by British novelist and screen writer Simon Toyne, is a front-list hardback that launched a month ago. From the prestigious William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins, it is a police procedural featuring an unmoored doctor of forensic criminology juggling melancholia over unsettling work and being a single mother. Her tetchy teenage daughter is champing at the bit to know who her father is while caustically disapproving of her mother’s unspeakable occupation and covert love interest and workmate, Tannahill Khan.

Police procedurals play heavy all crime fiction, but cops investigating criminality can easily get insipid. That’s why Murder Ink customarily selects craftier books with more subtlety and emotional substance. “The Black Highway” skims the cream off both.

The River Thames – the historic, 217-mile waterway bisecting London and discharging into the North Sea – plays a major part in Toyne’s story. It is a harbinger of one and then another and another gruesome corpse fetching in what quickly are deemed revenge murders. All the corpses are men dressed in tailored suits, absent their heads and hands. In usual police procedurals, those authors pride themselves on descriptions of gore. 

But for Toyne, the vandalized, washed-up bodies are a plot driver only; once they’re discovered we don’t return to them. Rather, Toyne has constructed a multilayered mystery about real people who by chance have jobs in law enforcement and have the usual family issues, everyday predicaments and personal variances. 

So here’s what you will enjoy with Toyne’s tale, minus spoiling the denouement. While forensics will come up with the identity of what London police call “floaters,” whoever is behind this grotesque messaging is the focus of investigation, not the deviance of the deed. 

Laughton Rees, saddled with a family name from her late father who was the former commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, fell into a dalliance 16 years ago with an unctuous bar lizard, Shelby Facer. She became pregnant, gave birth to a daughter named Gracie and hadn’t heard from Shelby until 16 years later, after his release from prison for a bungled diamond heist.

Showing up at Laughton’s stately apartment left to her by her father, he wants to know the daughter he abandoned, along with her pregnant mother. 

Gracie, something of a typical disaffected teenager, learns of her estranged father and wants to know him now that he has shown up with a whipped-dog gentleness from 16 years behind bars. 

Laughton has no lost love for Shelby, a poser she accidentally encountered and married for a moment and who sexually misused her. Plus, with her experience in the underworld, she has no generosity toward criminals, exacerbated by her protective maternal instincts and distrust of Shelby.

It doesn’t take more than his first visit for Shelby to pursue an avuncular relationship with Gracie. Both are seeking the affection of lost years, at least is Gracie, while Shelby, as it turns out, is seeking leverage as con artists do to make up for what they feel are years wasted by others.

Gracie and Shelby meet for coffee and after-school strolls while Laughton and Tannahill track down the relationship between the floaters and the still-missing satchel of uncut diamonds.

“The Black Highway,” a euphemism for the River Thames and its legendary disposal of centuries of secrets, becomes very clever at this point. Laughton and Tannahill piece together the relationship among the floaters with Shelby’s ongoing drip of information about his surprising relationship to each. 

The story gets adventurous toward the end, adding a tenor of danger that reaches a crescendo that was unexpected and in some way hoped for. It is seemingly inescapable with nearly every fictional crime novel: endings are a challenge. Had “The Black Highway” not been so intriguing, I would have scrapped it for its disappointing ending. But it’s worth your time and a few Hamiltons to read a good story. 

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