When The Dead Come Calling by Helen Sedgwick

I read this book a while back and really enjoyed it so I'm delighted to share my review of When The Dead Come Calling by Helen Sedgwick as part of the blog tour. Many thanks to Kelly Lacey at Love Books Tours for the invitation and to the publisher for my review copy. 

 

The Blurb

In the first of the Burrowhead Mysteries, an atmospheric murder investigation unearths the brutal history of a village where no one is innocent.

When psychotherapist Alexis Cosse is found murdered in the playground of the sleepy northern village of Burrowhead, DI Strachan and her team of local police investigate, exposing a maelstrom of racism, misogyny and homophobia simmering beneath the surface of the village.

Shaken by the revelations and beginning to doubt her relationship with her husband, DI Strachan discovers something lurking in the history of Burrowhead, while someone (or something) equally threatening is hiding in the strange and haunted cave beneath the cliffs...

My Review

Well, I'll open by saying I enjoyed When The Dead Come Calling enough to buy my own paperback copy. It took me a while to get into this book but it's one I was thinking about long after I'd finished it. And it was always going to be a bit of a winner for me - there's a character called Suze in it! 

The book opens with a very atmospheric first chapter with someone hiding out in a cave before the action moves into town and the discovery of a body, someone known well by one of the small police team, in the children's playground. The investigation that follows throws up some disturbing findings...

Not really sure what I thought of main character DI Georgie Strachan. She has an interesting back story and I liked the way information about her was teased out throughout the book, with maybe more to come in future books. I  didn't warm to her like I wanted to, even by the end. Her husband Fergus, I just wanted to shake though! Simon broke my heart and it was team member Trish that I could relate to the most.

We don't know who anyone is at the beginning which I found a bit disorienting, especially with the sharp change in tone and scenes in the first three chapters. Things jump about a bit and the story is told from various viewpoints but once I got into it I was OK with that. Although in the two or three chapters from the point of view of outsider DS Frazer, drafted in from the city to support Georgie's unit, the police team are referred to by rank and surname whereas first names are used elsewhere. I understand why that was done but it didn't work for me.  I really liked the interesting chapter headings (which, of course, make more sense in context). Some examples are  'What Wednesdays Used to be Like', 'The Shapes of the Evening' 'and The Darkness Surrounding Mrs Helmsteading'. 

 
I loved the author's world building and how the landscape and weather played such a large part in the story. But also, the indoor spaces were described really well. Her descriptions are wonderful, my favourite thing about this book. The bit about the cave mentioned at the beginning hooked me in:

'a cavern the width of my arm span and the height of a block of flats - emptied for demolition but left standing, to rot, repainted on the inside with bird shit. Shouldn't have left those windows open.'

And there are many more examples: 

'But her words are snatched by the wind, to be coated in salt and preserved for the apocalypse.'
'... with the cold moving past his wrists, past his elbows and curling around his chest.'
'The human croak of the roundabout as it turns. The ache of it.'
‘The wind is singing a grit-song now, spitting sand at my eyes.'

The nod to the supernatural, something otherworldly - I really didn't expect that and it knocked me off balance a little at first. But it's that that I keep coming back to, keep thinking about.

When The Dead Come Calling is an easy to read, effective police procedural which is also emotive and evocative. It touches on some difficult subjects and has some tragic moments. Its hint of otherworldliness was a really interesting surprise and one I liked.  But for me, the book's strength is how beautifully descriptive it is. Enjoyed it. 

The Author

Helen Sedgwick is the author of The Comet Seekers and The Growing Season, which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year in 2018. The opener to her Burrowhead Mysteries crime trilogy, When the Dead Come Calling, was published in 2020, followed by Where the Missing Gather in 2021. She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from Glasgow University and has won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Before she became an author, she was a research physicist with a PhD in Physics from Edinburgh University. She lives in the Scottish Highlands.