Harry Bingham

This was an odd, sometimes compelling, sometimes exasperating mix of police procedural and psychological thriller, and it never quite decides which one it wants to be. The result, for me, is a book that kept pulling me along, then tripping itself up.

The premise is undeniably strong: a “damaged”, hyper-observant detective-in-training, a grim Welsh setting, a dead girl who does not stay neatly dead (at least, not in the way the narrative wants her to), and a mystery with enough hooks to show more keep the pages turning. When Bingham focuses on the investigation, the novel has that familiar genre satisfaction: clues, reversals, institutional friction - albeit with a slightly skewed angle that separates it from the more straightforward, momentum-first crime writing I usually enjoy.

»I tell him that there’s one man dead, and four others, who might or might not be dead by the time help arrives.«

My main problem with this novel is its pacing. Scenes that ought to tighten the screw sometimes drift, and moments that should land as unsettling tip into something that feels faintly absurd. “Weird” can be a strength in crime fiction - think of how certain Nordic noirs let bleakness curdle into the uncanny - but here it often felt like a pacing substitute rather than an intentional mood.

»I’m standing next to them in my long white gown and ridiculous boots, feeling like an extra from some low-budget horror movie, when I notice that my heart is fluttering.«

And then there’s Cotard’s syndrome. Yes, the book tries to justify it, but it is so exceedingly rare that leaning on it this heavily starts to feel like narrative cosplay: a clinical label dragged in to make the protagonist more “special”, rather than more believable. I’m all for damaged detectives, but I want the damage to deepen the story, not periodically derail it.

»Cotard’s syndrome.” Brydon stares at me, somber and without judgment.«

I also struggled with the voice in a way I can’t fully separate from authorship: at times, it felt like a male writer “writing” a female protagonist, rather than a woman speaking on the page. It’s not constant, but when the narration lingers on the arrangement of clothing and hair, or frames a dead body in terms of how it might look “to best advantage”, it pulls me out of Fiona’s head and into the author’s hand.

I’ve also read many reviews that call Fiona “quirky”. She isn’t. “Quirky” is the word you reach for when you want to domesticate discomfort - when a behaviour is odd, but you would rather frame it as charming eccentricity than sit with what the text is insisting upon.

If we take “Talking to the Dead” at face value, Fiona is not doing manic-pixie flourishes, or being whimsically offbeat for colour. She is living with something the book repeatedly positions as a profound, disorienting disruption of selfhood. Her coping mechanisms, affect, and decision-making are not narrative seasoning; they are the point. To call that “quirky” is to shrink an illness into a personality trait.

The core issue is language as ethics: labels decide whether we are taking a character’s suffering seriously, or turning it into a cute tic for our entertainment. A “quirky” protagonist asks you to smile indulgently. Fiona, as written, asks you to reckon with the cost of her condition, and with how everyone around her either accommodates it, exploits it, or quietly looks away.

I probably won’t continue this series, despite Fiona being an interesting character. This opener is a messy mix of procedural bones and (to me, unconvincing) psychological garnish, and that split - between the satisfying mechanics of a crime novel and the insistence on a psychiatric “hook” - is exactly where the book’s identity crisis lives.

Three stars out of five.

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The second entry in Bingham's innovative Fiona Griffiths series, about a Detective Constable in South Wales whose personal situation make her both a very good detective and a very bad team player. In this one, Fiona and colleagues are faced with the discovery of two dismembered corpses: one turns out to be a missing persons case from a few years earlier, and the other is a recent murder. The discovery of the various body parts in the same general vicinity argues for the two cases to be show more connected, but the police struggle to make a connection between the victims until Fiona expands the range of possible motives.

It's hard to overstate how interesting Fiona is as a main character. On one hand, these are standard police procedural mysteries, though tightly plotted and peopled with interesting characters, good guys and bad guys alike. On the other hand, the notion of a first-person narrator who openly acknowledges her personal (and ongoing) history of mental illness is not one I can recall ever encountering before. Bingham excels with his sympathetic and unsentimental portrayal of Fiona: She asks for no sympathy or accommodation either from the reader or her police bosses. Most valuably, Fiona is portrayed as a productive member of society not despite her mental illness but in many ways because of it. It's an invaluable viewpoint in a world where too often mental illness is treated as something shameful or as a stigma that completely cancels out any abilities the person might have. show less

My first encounter with DC Fiona Griffiths was in Harry Bingham's Talking to the Dead, and it became one of my Best Reads of 2012. Love Story, With Murders is now one of my Best Reads of 2014, and it has everything to do with Fiona... Fi.

While in her teens she suffered an unusual sort of breakdown, and it has colored everything in her world: how she relates to people, how she thinks, how she copes with stress. She's almost the idiot savant of the Cardiff police force-- one moment disobeying show more orders and haring off to do something extremely foolhardy, and the next moment putting totally disparate clues together to crack a case. Reviewers have likened her to Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, and they are similar in their strange intelligence, but where Lisbeth radiates hostility, Fi is often endearing-- especially once you know the truth about her breakdown.

Love Story, With Murders continues the story of Fi's reintroduction to the normal world. She's got a man in her life now, and she works to remember to do all that "boyfriend stuff" that he expects. You can almost chart her progress as the pages turn, and it makes you feel good. She's also developing a rapport with her boss, Rhiannon Watkins, a woman so disliked that she could be "the first murder victim with over a million plausible suspects. A group that would include every one of her CID colleagues." Watkins can see flashes of Fi's brilliance, and Fi always seems to ignore the superficial to see things in people that normally go unnoticed. Boyfriend, boss... and family, for Fi's father also becomes part of the investigation, which is both a worry and a help to the young detective constable.

The case is a true puzzler; however, I was so wrapped up in watching Fiona put the clues together that I made no attempt to solve the crimes ahead of her. Bingham has combined an absolutely brilliant characterization with a finely constructed mystery-- for the second time in a row. Love Story, With Murders can be read as a standalone, but if wonderful characters are one of the main reasons why you read, why deny yourself the pleasure of even one paragraph of Fiona Griffiths' story? show less

First Line: Beyond the window, I can see three kites hanging in the air over Bute Park.

The crime scene is a sad one: a woman killed after a short life ruined by drugs and prostitution... and her small six-year-old daughter lying dead beside her. The only thing that marks this crime scene as unusual is one small piece of evidence. Why would a drug addicted prostitute have the debit card of a very wealthy man who's been dead for months?

Police headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, has more important show more cases to focus on, but there's one person who can't let this one go: young Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, who's got a reputation for being odd. She can become intensely focused on certain aspects of an investigation, and she doesn't always pick up on social cues. And everyone has heard about that two-year gap in her past.... (Psst! She had a breakdown. Mind-- you never heard it from me!)

Even though she has to get called on the carpet by her superior officer and told that she must do as she's told (no ignoring bits of the investigation that bore her, no haring off on some wild idea that she's gotten), Fi Griffiths has all the hallmarks of a brilliant, intuitive investigator. Told to check out the dead man's credit card and nothing more, Fi rapidly heads off on her own investigation because she's positive that dead little six-year-old has something important to tell her.

From the very beginning, Fiona Griffiths grabbed my attention and my sympathy. Throughout most of the book, her mental state is dealt with mostly by hints and innuendo, but the deeper she dives into this investigation, the more obvious it is that something is very wrong with her. From her flashes of insight and her way of putting clues together, to the way she counts the backwards and forwards "if's" in her name, to the way she tries to begin a relationship with a fellow officer, Fiona is an endearing-- and sometimes maddening-- creature.

She tries so hard to come down to Planet Normal-- to know when to laugh and how to smile at the right times-- that I couldn't help but want to get to know her and help her. So many times throughout the book, Fiona's thoughts would sing across the page and make me smile in recognition... or make my heart break. This is one incredibly memorable character, and I have to know more about her.

The fact that she's involved in a complex and dangerous investigation doesn't hurt one bit either. I couldn't put the pieces of it together and had to rely on Fiona's intuition to get us through. On his website the author states that he's working on more books in the series, and that is very welcome news. One thing that I would hope for in the future is that Fiona learns a bit of caution. The way she plows ahead into danger without waiting for backup-- although it fit the situation-- would mean that she would have a short life expectancy in the real world. Since she's a compelling character who's grabbed my interest in both hands, I want her to live for a good, long time. show less