No Time to Cry: Constance Fairchild Series 1 (The Constance Fairchild Series)

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I would like to thank Netgalley and Headline for an advance copy of Nowhere to Run, the third novel to feature Detective Con(stance) Fairchild of the National Crime Agency. Con doesn’t get on with her parents as they disapproved of her choice to become a police officer. Despite her upbringing she is far from being the lady she was raised to be. With tattoos on her arms, she likes to drink a pint when in the local pub and her language is hardly that of a refined lady! As ever with Mr Oswald there is a hint of the otherworldly. It’s incredibly nebulous and mostly there is a rational explanation but still... This is reinforced by the ritualistic nature of the mutilations which adds to the swirl, just because you don’t share the murderer’s beliefs and their reason for killing it doesn’t make the victims any less dead. I never know what to make of it but I enjoy the dubiety of it all. The Setting. Well presented and feeling real. Gritty but avoiding the sense of being utterly bleak which can be the downfall of such books. There are pools of peace and good people as well as bad. Ardent readers of the Inspector McLean series penned by James Oswald also sought these book series.

Oswald’s USP if you will, is his ability to weave just the right amount of supernatural into his stories in such a way that he leaves it open to the reader to decide if they are spooky goings on, or just easily explained coincidence. It makes his novels a little like a choose your own adventure story. You want to believe that Madame Rose lives in a magic house you can, or if you want to believe Constance doesn’t leave the house for three days because she’s exhausted – you can. It’s so cleverly done, in all of his books. So you kind of get a two for one deal. A police procedural, and a fantasy book rolled into one. Part of this book is set in Edinburgh, which is one of my favourite cities so I enjoyed following Constance on her visit there. This part also features a bit of a cross over with characters from the MacLean series which as a huge fan of the series I found hugely enjoyable. I’d love the two teams to feature in future books! I really enjoy James Oswald's writing and love the Inspector McLean series and had high hopes for this one after the first book but what happened in the second half of this novel. The plot was well set up and the characters laid out and then it was as if the author lost his direction or interest. Hopefully a blip and I fully intend to continue reading both the McLean and Fairchild series. Detective Constable Constance Fairchild is on compassionate leave following the death of her mother, and is renting a cottage near Aberystwyth, Wales to get away from the hustle and bustle of London. The problem is trouble appears to follow Fairchild around and she finds herself in a police station cell after defending herself from two would-be rapists. While at the station she is mistakenly put in the same cell as a young Ukrainian woman, Lila, who confides in that she’s been forced by her manipulative boyfriend into prostitution and running drugs. Fearing for her life, she has run away from him, only to end up in the cells.

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She’s been suspended since then, awaiting her opportunity to testify at the trial of wealthy businessman Roger De Villiers and D.S. Gordon Bailey who between them ran a murky business empire. With the Madame Rose character (hovering between the two series, Fairchild and McLean ) and her the overall fantasy occult transgender crystal ballall-knowing magical circusy mystery aura added to the mix of nothing much happening except a lot of wandering around, not much of a plot, lots of padding out with not much happening. Each character seems silly, including each Fairchild, cop, villain, extras superfluous to requirements ... Everyone's a cliche. There's nobody 'normal' to move a police story along. The style of telling this story is all over the place. This is the second book in the series which features DC Constance Fairchild which is written by James Oswald and I have taken to this series just like the Inspector McLean series, I love it! Her mother introduces her to an imposing figure, The Reverend Dr Edward Masters of the Church of the Coming Light. She knows their name because she has seen them taking some of the homeless and drug addicts off the streets in London, near where she lives.

Oswald does a good job of giving a sense both of the town of Aberystwyth, and the isolation of the surrounding countryside. Aber really is a town on the edge of the country, and it feels like that in this book. The geography is slightly off, but you’ll only know that if you know the local area. He also plays fast and loose with the local legends, but that’s one of the reasons why I like Oswald's work, that 'is the supernatural real or just something we imagined' theme runs through all the James Oswald's books I’ve read so far. Six decades previously, a young girl died a grisly death; her murderers disfigured her body, disemboweled her, and preserved her body organs in containers. Fast forward to sixty years later, the young girl’s decades-old murder has been noticed and the old murder case has been assigned to police detective Anthony McLean. The death has the hallmarks of an age-old ritual wherein people sought immortality by trapping demons in a girl’s corpse. Detective McLean, who has so much on his plate, is juggling other cases of murders, burglar cases wherein cats are stolen from recently deceased people’s homes, and is striving to reconcile these all the while.It starts off pretty sedately with Con recuperating in an isolated cottage in Wales but, as is the case with Con, trouble seems to find her regardless of whether she is in the centre of London or in the middle of nowhere! Here she is getting embroiled in a smuggling operation on the Welsh coastline - you just know from the very beginning that things aren't going to go well for Con but little do we know just how bad. I really like Con, she’s strong, independent and certainly feisty and dogged in her determination to find the truth. I’ll certainly be looking out for the next in the series. So when she unwittingly falls foul of two local men and ends up in a jail cell with Lila, a young Ukranian woman, it is not long before Con finds herself at the dark heart of a criminal enterprise which involves, drugs, modern slavery and prostitution.

Trouble always seems to find her, and even if she has nothing to hide, perhaps she has everything to lose . . . James has pursued a varied career - from Wine Merchant to International Carriage Driving Course Builder via Call Centre Operative and professional Sheep Shit Sampler (true). He moved out of the caravan when Storm Gertrude blew the Dutch barn down on top of it, and now lives in a proper house with two dogs, two cats and a long-suffering partner. He farms Highland cows by day, writes disturbing fiction by night. James Oswald was a writer of Fantasy books before he was persuaded by fellow Scottish author Stuart MacBride that crime fiction was a better and more popular genre and so he launched the very successful Inspector McLean series of books which whilst they were police procedurals as is the Constance Fairchild series have an element of fantasy in them.My first J.Oswald read was a McLean story, at least it was more tightly written as a police procedural, this was a combo of circus, Indiana Jones crypt cliche and new world religion folks. The featured protagonist in the two aforementioned books is Anthony McLean, a police inspector. McLean is a homicide detective who was orphaned at an early age. He was reared by his grandmother who, after being in a comatose for quite some time, died of stroke. The pacing is superb - bursts of action and dread then quieter moments to process what we've just experienced, plus plenty to get the "just one more chapter" muscles working overtime - and the setting is beautifully realised, showing the darker sides of this seemingly idyllic area.