Women Who Kill - M.R. Mackenzie
At this stage a 'but' or 'however' might be expected and I do have one minor personal misgiving that I'll come to later. For most readers however, the only condition worth mentioning is that it would be better if you had read the earlier books in the Anna Scavolini series or perhaps hadn't taken as long a gap as I had between this and the previous Anna Scavolini mystery, The Shadow Men, which I read in 2021. Even then, it's by no means essential. All you need to know is clearly laid out for you early on; Anna is a writer and lecturer, a Professor of Criminology, but she has practical experience of the system and criminal case through her own personal circumstances. At the start of Women Who Kill, she is currently trying to write a book on the many problems with the current prison and criminal justice system.
Women Who Kills really takes flight then when a planned interview for her book at a women's prison fails to happen and Anna unexpectedly finds she has a new volunteer who will speak to her. None other than the person highlighted in the opening scene, one of the most notorious of female criminals. Sandra Morton, dubbed the Ice Queen. Convicted 18 years ago of the murder of her husband and two of her three children, Morton’s unusual demeanour and way of presenting herself doesn't endear her to anyone, and even her protest of innocence sounds hollow. Nonetheless a rapport of some sort is struck with Anna, even if Anna can't see it. With her area of specialism and her own personal history she is invited by her legal representative and solicitor Pamela, to read through what documentation is still available and see whether there might be grounds for another fresh appeal where all the others have so far failed.
It's here we get to the intriguing background of the case as Anna goes through the haphazard collection of interviews and transcripts and tries to gain a picture of the woman and whether indeed there might be any room for doubt about whether she actually committed the murders. And it's here also that you get what I think Michael Mackenzie offers that is different from most other traditional writers of crime fiction. Women Who Kill does indeed offer the essential crime fiction thrills, but it leans more towards criminal character study than a murder mystery. Through Anna's perspective, we really get a case study in which she explore attitudes, prejudices and inequalities in the criminal justice system, but not in an entirely academic or preachy way. Or maybe just a little.
We should reasonably assume in a conventional crime thriller that despite the circumstantial evidence that Sandra is innocent, that Anna finds a thread to follow that no one else has stumbled upon, so the mystery is why is Sandra so disagreeable as to almost convict herself by her unhelpful behaviour and unpleasant attitude. That might not sound as fascinating as a regular crime thriller, but it's actually this enigma of personality that is what inspires Anna, despite her better judgement, to look deeper into the case. And perhaps she is also swayed - as this reader is - by the character of the enthusiastic and solicitous solicitor Pamela. Mackenzie certainly enjoys playing on the contracts between the two women, delighting in not only making Sandra rather more than just rude and disagreeable, but inviting the reader to also have little sympathy for her.
That’s not particularly new, and it's been done again more recently in Nicci Cloke's Her Many Faces, not to mention real-life murder cases where women have been depicted in a certain light by the press and media (not to mention social media now). The intention is obviously to challenge the reader to confront their own prejudices, and perhaps reflect and broaden their mind when it comes to similar situations in real life but there are many other issues that arise along the way. Not least of which is an intriguing murder mystery, since if Sandra Morton didn't do it - although it's hard to find actual compelling evidence of her innocence - who did?
The interview transcripts and exchanges that Anna discovers are spiky, laced with sarcasm, humour and inventively employed bad language, but also very revealing of character, or perhaps subtly revealing of character. By the time Anna gets to exploring her subject more closely, you are likely to find yourself similarly hooked on the little details of personality and strange behaviours surrounding the killings and the gossip filled testimony of neighbours that helped seal Sandra’s conviction, certainly in the eye of the general public and presumably the jury at her trial. You can see why she might be fascinating, but you can also see how willing you and others are to leap to judgement based on just the surface impressions you know. Ok, you might get a little bit of a homily about contemporary social issues and the prevalence of such attitudes now and again, but these are always points worth making.
Mackenzie has a solid grasp of direction and consequently carries the reader along with ease through to the dramatic although perhaps overly staged conclusion. Personally - and this is my own personal niggle - I'm not enamoured of the intrusive domestic problems of the Scavolini family and the problems with bringing up a small child while investigating serious crime, none of which I feel adds any real value here, but it's all part of building character in a series, and as such may have a part to play later. Likewise Zoe, another wonderful character in the series, is wasted being relegated to a child minder for the entire novel. I’m sure she will have another larger role in the future, but not here. The main thrust of the book, the revelations and conclusions however are all well delivered and I think it's fair to say that at the end of this one, Anna is not going to be any more impressed by the policing or any aspect of the current criminal justice system than she was before she started writing her own book about it.
Comments
Post a Comment