Untouchable, by Robert Innes

[Ulysses]

Untouchable
By Robert Innes
By the author, 2016
Four stars

This is the first of Robert Innes’ Blake Harte detective series. I liked it so much I bought the next two books immediately when I finished it. It is a fairly short novel, and there’s the danger that this series will become like a bag of potato chips (or, as these are set in the UK, crisps); I may find myself devouring them all.

The core premise is that Detective Harte has left the big-city police force of Manchester because of a broken heart. He finds himself assigned to a small country town called Harmschapel, where everybody knows who he is, and everybody knows what everyone else is doing.

On Harte’s very first day, a bizarre murder happens virtually in front of Harte and his fellow village policemen. It seems impossible, and Harte is challenged both with solving the mystery, and with finding his way into a new relationship with the men and women with whom he must work, his superior officer, and all those people who are now his neighbors. To make things more complicated, both the murder victim, Daniel Donaldson, and one of the chief suspects, Harrison Baxter, are gay.

Innes’ writing is plain, and there is a very consistent use of incorrect grammar that leads me to feel that there’s a regional British dialect going on. Or, perhaps, just careless editing. Where this book shines is in the careful characterization of the people we meet throughout the narrative. The intimacy of living and working in a small town is underscored by the way that everybody immediately refers to each other by their first names. Blake picks up on this right away. Blake is also the kind of detective who depends heavily on psychological understanding of all the players in the drama. He wants to know motivation as well as what sort of state of mind everybody is in. It is Blake’s ability to see past the obvious, and get to people’s emotional underpinnings that makes him so good at what he does, and makes the book so very engaging.

The story is a stand-alone, but the town and its people are all set up for repeat performances as the series goes forward. Imagine Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple as a thirty-year-old heartbroken gay man, and you’ll have the idea. It’s a good idea for a series and I so look forward to the next chapter.