Book review: Death Rites by Sarah Ward

Jon Gower

If the measure of success of a crime novel is the speed with which you turn its pages then the latest work by Lampeter-based writer Sarah Ward requires one of those rubber thumb-thimbles that bank tellers use for counting notes. It’s a compelling tale and one which takes you a long way from her home in Ceredigion.

Death Rites is set in a normally quiet college town in New England, where a newly hired archaeologist, Carla James is settling into her first term of teaching, But hardly has she managed to sit down in her chair before she is whisked away to a crime scene, where some oddities about the killing mean the police reluctantly need to call in some expert help.

Serial killer

The cops in question include a surly one straight out of central casting, who doesn’t seem all that keen to help, as seems to be true of so many of the townsfolk especially when it becomes evident that a serial killer is on the prowl.

The college authorities don’t want the adverse publicity while the police don’t want the work, not if it keeps them out of the bar. Then there’s the powerful family whose name is found all over the place, from college benefactors to shopping mall developers, who seem to somehow own the place. It’s a situation with a lot of suspects too, which all helps keeping the reader guessing or being led down dead ends, if you pardon the pun.

Tight-lipped silence

In the face of so much tight-lipped silence, Carla is forced to go solo, ferreting around for clues which seem to connect the ritualistic symbols and paraphernalia found near each victim with very old superstitions about effective ways to ward off witches.

In so doing she puts her own life in danger, even as she begins to discern a pattern emerging, which suggests that the killer is building to his own violent crescendo of crime, thus giving her much less time to get to the bloody heart of the matter. It certainly doesn’t help that Carla’s been given a room in college vacated by her predecessor who seemed to have walked into the river with her pockets weighted down with pieces of quartz, and the suggestion that she, too is a victim of the shadowy assassin. The book gives us regular glimpses into the killer’s mind as he recollects his dark actions and we can feel his compelliing need to kill again.

Fogs of the past

It’s a neat twist to have a crime mystery with an archaeologist hero, as it takes us away from the modern plot to the suspicious fogs of the past, a feature of the writing of the likes of James Lee Burke, who’ll often connect modern New Orleans or Montana with the dark days of the American Civil War. Like Burke, Ward is very good at deftly conjuring up place, in this case the new country in which Carla James now finds herself:

She loved the thought of New England brought alive in the books by Edith Wharton and John Updikea and wanted to embrace the small towns that retained their settler feel, the changeable seasons each with their own dynamic and the academic excellence offered by Jericho College.

As the book’s strapline has it ‘It takes an expert in death to catch a killer’ and there’s certainly a lot of learned expertise on display in this confident, solidly constructed page-turner. It’s evident that Carla has what it takes to act as the bedrock of her own series, digging into the past to understand the present, and, one suspects, should that series come into being, looking for love.

Lone wolf

Because Carla is a lone operator not out of choice but because she had lost her partner. In that sense she is an expert in death two times over, which helps explain her ready empathy with the victims’ families and her ability to read the runes and signals that take her ever closer to the heart of the dark web in which her dastardly, calculating killer sits, plotting his next murderous move, counting down his victims.

Death Rites by Sarah Ward is published by Canelo Crime. It is available from all good bookshops.