| Dead Wood. - Chris Longmuir. |
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There's little joy around when you’re poor and a single mother in a run-down Dundee housing scheme. Then, when your feckless partner takes a hike owing a £500 drug debt to the city’s Mr Big, you know that the next knock on your door will be anything but friendly. Only, of course, they never bother to
knock.
And right on cue, Tony Palmer’s goons pay you a visit. They’re not polite and make it quite clear that Tony wants his money. Then they knock you about a wee bit. Just a taster — a kind of heavy-handed hint to get the cash in a big hurry.
But that was Kara’s problem — how to lay her hands on the money real quick. Still, she knew the answer even as she asked the question. After all, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been forced to do it before — she was young, slim and still attractive.
So it was time to dig out the short skirt, the fishnet hold-ups, the dangly earrings and the black stilettos. Time to hug Charlene and wee Billy. Time to head for Dock Street and join the rest of the working girls, shivering on a cold and rainy January night.
The punter drove a red estate car. He seemed harmless enough and anyway, Tony’s goons were chasing her so she got in. But for Kara, that moment was to be the start of a living hell. The stranger kept driving, dismissing her protests, until they had left the city behind. He eventually turned off the road and stopped in a wooded area. It was pitch dark.
The scenario is now set for this edge-of-the-seat, prize-winning tale by Montrose author, Chris Longmuir. Entitled Dead Wood, her novel describes in graphic detail the hunt for a deranged serial killer. Ms Longmuir’s book won her the 2009 Dundee International Book Prize worth £10,000. Well deserved.
This novel, which lays bare urban decay and criminal deprivation in modern Dundee, harks back 30 years to the discovery of two girls’ bodies in nearby Templeton Woods.
No one was ever brought to book for the crimes but Ms Longmuir provides us with a highly pertinent, albeit fictitious, connection.
Kara, meanwhile, finds herself hunted all across the city. She sees the bodies of three girls before escaping from her would-be killer. One of them was Tony Palmer’s missing daughter, something Kara blurts out in a garbled, terror-stricken phone call to the police.
Chris Longmuir mixes her ingredients with the surest of touches. On one hand, we have Tony, the cold, calculating, club-owning gangster, hell bent on wreaking a terrible revenge on whoever murdered his daughter. On the other, we meet a team of dedicated police officers equally determined to find the killer before he does. And stuck in the middle there is Kara, key to the whole mystery, hiding away, yet desperate to get her kids back from social services.
The story — interspersed throughout with the deranged ramblings of the unknown killer — unfolds within its own narrow world of Dundee’s pubs, Tony’s club, a run-down housing complex and the soulless, rain-swept streets huddled beneath another east coast January sky.
Meanwhile, it’s best to ignore the dead cat odorously decomposing at the back of that close in Clepington Road. But don’t forget the woman who lives upstairs with her boyfriend’s pythons. She’s important, too. |
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