feels like the writer came to a page and said, "nah that's enough of this one" and just stopped writing. i admire his insouciance but it's maybe not the best approach when you're writing a detective novel. i think i'll imitate his panache and ignore the rest of his work. it wasn't very memorable, and i'm not sure detective stories and supernatural tales mix that well anyway, so maybe the writer's indifference was well-founded. ( )

Ragged Alice is a smooth blend of police procedural and supernatural thriller with an authentic Welsh setting and lyrical descriptions.

I consumed the 202 pages of "Ragged Alice" in a single sitting, partly because I needed to know where Gareth Powell would take the story and partly because I was beguiled by the language.

"Ragged Alice" is the start of a new series featuring DCI Holly Craig, No, don't groan and say "not another one?" True she's a police officer who drinks too much and has poor social skills but trust me, she's not the typical Brit cop. She has an ability (you might call it a gift, she often calls ita curse held at bay only by whisky) to look into a person's eyes and know how far they've been eroded by guilt, shame and dissolution.

She's returned to her native Wales fifteen years after escaping it with the intention never to return and immediately finds herself investigating a murder in the small seaside town she grew up.

This is a short, fast-moving story, where the body count seems to rise with every tide, the violence is graphic and the spirits of the dead are always with those who have the eyes to see them.

One of the joys of the book for me was the wonderful language used to describe the place and its people. One chapter starts with a single sentence evoking a rainy day in Wales in a way that reminded me of Dylan Thomas:

RAIN FELL ACROSS THE bracken-brown hills like a biblical punishment. It dripped from the town’s slick slate roofs, overflowed the gutters and ran in gurgling torrents down the steep-sided streets.

The story features, Mrs Phillips, a flamboyant woman in her nineties who makes an immediate impression. Here's how her first meeting with DCI Craig is described:

An old woman waited on the hotel steps. She wore a man’s white tuxedo jacket over a lilac ball gown and was smoking a cigarette.

´Are you the detective, love?”

Holly paused. The old girl must have been « ninety if she was a day. Her hands looked like sausage skins filled with walnuts. She leant her weight on a silver-topped cane and had slicked back her silver hair with fragrant pomade.
Isn't that a wonderful way to describe hands?

Later, when Holly Craig thinks back on Mrs Phillips, she describes her to herself as:

the living personification of the Victorian buildings on the seafront—their facades once proud and enthusiastic but now washed out, half-forgotten and clinging to past glories, their lungs ravaged by years of smoke, black mould and neglect.
I admire the aptness and exuberance of that.

I also like the small but telling ways in which life in a small town in Wales was evoked, for example, when DCI Craig is surprised that Mrs Phillips knows of something that happened only a few hours ago, the irrepressible old woman says:

“Oh, you know what this place is like, love. If you lose your virginity at lunchtime, someone will have found it and brought it home to your mam in time for tea.”

I recommend "Ragged Alice" if you're in the mood for a trope-twisting police procedural with a supernatural edge, a distinctive Welsh flavour and language that makes you go "I wish I'd written that". ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3366809.html

I liked this a lot - police procedural meets horror, as with a lot of popular UK-based writing at the moment, but this time in Wales rather than London (Cornell/Aaronovitch). Some bits didn't quite make sense, in terms of police procedure - how come the protagonist gets called in so quickly? How come nobody in her chain of command spots the resonances with her own personal history? - but it was a compelling if chilling read. ( )

In this fast paranormal crime novel, we meet Holly Craig, London Detective, who travels back to her sleepy coastal home town in Wales. She is here to take a breather from a big job back in London, and this crime seems like an easy open shut case- a woman is hit and her partner was seen following her after a dispute. Should be a walk in the park, but there is something larger and more sinister at work here, that is going to go back into Holly's own history, a past she has spent her whole life running from.Ragged Alice is Hollys mother, brutally murdered decades prior, and now a witchy legend used to spook the children in the area to stay out of the woods. Holly has been running from this horrible tale her whole life, unsolved. But now she is being forced to investigate the past to solve the future.Holly also possesses a special gift, where she is able to see the evil in a persons soul.I rated this book highly, its a very fast and action packed story, I was creeping up to the final chapters still waiting for the ending, with anticipation growing as the remaining read counted got smaller and smaller. As much as I enjoyed this I wish it had gone longer, firstly it was so good that I didnt want it to end, and secondly I really want more of Holly Craig as my superhero.The only thing stopping this book from getting the 5 star rating was the hype around Hollys special ability, it was well explained, but she didn't really get to use it, or in any way that I noticed. I also felt this could have been explored a lot further and drawn out, there are many unanswered questions for me- this may be part of the appeal to the ending or a great set up to a series. I hope it becomes a series, Holly has so far to go with her tenacity and abilities. ( )