The Last to Disappear - Jo Spain
What is also not all that different is Spain's method of crime writing and investigation. She's not afraid of making figures a little more complex and less sympathetic than we are accustomed to: it's not just good people who die at the hands of criminals and there is often a reason that someone feels justification for taking a life. Or more than one. Here in The Last to Disappear you initially have a hard time finding much to like about the victim Vicky or her brother Alex who has come to Koppe in Finland looking to bring her body back home. Her death has only been reported to the family 6 weeks after she disappeared, but there is greater shock to come when they find that she hasn't fallen into a frozen lake by accident.
Alex Evans works as a lobbyist taking advantage of situations to enrich others and himself, although he does have the decency to have a twinge of guilt about it, or at least not really derive much satisfaction from how good he is at his job. He's also feeling guilty that he hasn't been in more regular contact with Vicky, but only when he finds out that she had been murdered. Alex doesn't endear himself either by blundering into Koppe inappropriately dressed for the extreme weather conditions, displaying open mistrust of the small local backwater police force led by the relatively young chief, Agatha.
We don't know too much about 26 year old Vicky Evans either, other than she has been alienated somewhat from the family back home in Yorkshire, who disapprove of her carefree lifestyle. Alex himself eventually just cut her off when he got tired of only being called when needed to bail her out of her latest problem. This brings us to another of Jo Spain's methods, which is withholding information, not giving us much upfront. That's not unusual in crime thrillers, and it's often done for the purposes of misdirection that permits a big twist. Since Spain knows this and knows that the careful seasoned crime thriller writer knows this, she often throws in another twist to confound the reader.
Here however in The Last to Disappear the approach is a little obvious and not very effective. It's clear what she is doing when she holds back on the name of a man in a sub-plot of the earlier disappearance of a local woman in the same town. While she happily gives names to the reindeer, she coyly refers to Kaya having an affair with "the man" or "her lover". It's not just the author who holds back information: Alex also decides not to share some pieces of information that might help shed some light on Vicky movements and behaviour. Agatha too, perhaps for more police procedural reasons, also takes her time in revealing certain facts to Alex that he might be entitled to know.
Whether you find this deliberate withholding of key information an annoying and frustrating convention, there's no doubt however that Spain writes a good thriller and it's at least excusable when there is a deeper underlying theme or purpose to the technique. In some ways the gradual revelations about his sister's life could be seen as Alex's way of getting to know her better, so we learn more about her at the same time as he does. That unfortunately is perhaps all that we learn, that people are not always what they seem on the surface. It's not a terribly uncommon idea for a thriller, but that's of course how such things tend to play out.
Personally, while there is a good murder-mystery element of The Last to Disappear and I was happy enough to stick with it to see what revelations were to come, I was ultimately disappointed by the technique and found the revelations and the conclusions drawn rather conventional, run of the mill and even predictable, which is something that Jo Spain's books rarely are.
Reading notes: The Last to Disappear by Jo Spain is published by Quercus on 12th May 2022. Reviewed from an advance proof provided by the publisher.
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