What Lies Buried by Margaret Kirk

I have just finished Margaret Kirk’s second Highland Noir book What lies Buried.

Margaret hooks you, in the first chapter, with a corpse uncovered on an Inverness construction site. With a bullet hole in its skull. A cold case, obviously, since it’s wearing World War Two dog tags, but an intriguing one, since the bones date from long after the end of the war. And why were they buried in a farm midden? Then, having made you wonder about the who-and-why of these seventy-year-old bones, you are plunged into an even darker crime: a ten-tear-old girl has been spirited away from a friend’s birthday party and has been missing for ten days.

The police team led by DI Lukas Mahler is under pressure: from the distraught parents, their superior officers, the press – and their own desperate feelings of responsibility and inadequacy. Not helped when the problem unexpectedly escalates.

Lukas is a detective with sharp suits, but no ego. An early morning runner with his own childhood trauma, who struggles to care for a mother whose mind is failing, it’s no wonder he is stalked by migraine headaches: an ice-pick of pain tapping at the base of his skull that tablets refuse to shift. Not that Lukas will let that stop him pursuing the bad guys, even if it earns him cracked ribs.

I enjoyed the quality of the writing, from fondly remembered Scottish words – and guiltily scoffed bakery products with a high-calorie content – to descriptions of Inverness and its steel and granite weather. Memories rushed back of pebble-dashed bungalows, with walls the colour of three-day-old porridge. I especially admired the picture of an alarmed construction worker belting up the track, hi-vis jacket billowing out behind him like a bairn playing at superheroes. 

The characters are real people, with acid indigestion, a tendency to devour Jaffa cakes when stressed, and the misguided conviction that a Homer Simpson air freshener will banish the stink of cigarette smoke and fish and chip wrappers from inside of an unloved car. DS Ian Ferguson, a conscientious and loyal colleage, is a slob at heart. The sarcastic, shifty and jealous DE Andy Black clearly means trouble for Mahler.

Her women are good, from the pregnant CSI, easing herself from a muddy trench full of old bones, her pregnancy bump straining against the white Teletubby suit, to DC Nazreen Khan, who is suitably polite when slapped down for giving constructive advice to a superior, but no pushover:

‘Absolutely.’ She clicks her seat belt into place and gives him an earnest I’ll-try-harder kind of smile. ‘No disrespect, sir.’

‘Fine. We’ll leave it there, then.’

‘But, seeing we’re talking about respect…if I catch you staring at my tits again, you’ll get my knee where it hurts most. And then I’ll hit you with a harassment charge. Sir.‘

A disturbing feature is an on-line group of vigilantes, convinced they can do a better job than the police. A worrying glimpse into the world of warped minds and the harm social media can do.

The plot has more complexities than a piece of Fair Isle knitting, and a twist approaching the end almost made me throw down my needles. There is even an intriguing ‘H’ figure lurking in the background. The abduction of a small girl doesn’t make comfortable reading. It is every parent’s nightmare. But the book is enlightening on the toll taken on those investigating such hideous events, and the extent to which they genuinely care.

Margaret’s debut novel, Shadow Man, won the Good Housekeeping First Novel Competition in 2016 and was published by Orion in 2017. Proof that entering competitions can work, and that reading books that result from them can be totally gripping.

 

Crime Writer Margaret Kirk – Our First Guest Contributor

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Shadow Man, What Lies Beneath

Easily the most popular of our historic posts is the one about Margaret Kirk’s winning entry to the Good Housekeeping 2016 Novel Competition: Shadow Man, a gritty Scottish crime novel.

 

 

 

 

So we were delighted when Margaret offered to give our followers advice from her own experience – especially as she is busy with the run-up to publication this summer of her second crime novel, What Lies Buried.

Here is what she said:

Do it Your Way – rewriting the rules to get yourself published

I enjoy reading the ‘Ninevoices’ blog, so when I was asked to contribute a guest post I was delighted to agree. Something cheering, I thought, in the midst of our midwinter blues – new year, new start kind of post, maybe? Ten ways to get yourself motivated, ten tips to taking your writing to where you want to be in 2019.

Then good sense intervened. Writing advice, from me? Really? I’ve only just finished my second novel, and I still count myself as a total newbie. I’m well aware that my route has not been the traditional one – I’d had some successes with short stories before I sent in my entry to the Good Housekeeping First Novel competition, but I had no expectations of actually winning it. And the publishing world is so unlike any environment I’ve encountered before, sometimes it feels as though I’ve landed in a country I’ve never heard of, where I don’t speak the language. With a road-map I can’t read.

So I’m going to turn this on its head. I’m going to look at the three pieces of writing advice I hear most frequently, and explain why I think they need to be approached with caution.

Write Every Day

Well, ideally, yes. Because there’s undeniably a certain consistency of thought, of image, that writing for a sustained period of time, day after day, can bring. But we all have lives, we all (and this is particularly true for women) have so many demands on our time. There is absolutely no reason to feel guilty/feel you haven’t got what it takes/feel anything negative at all if sometimes you can’t find the time, the mental space or the energy to write. This really is okay. When you do have the time and energy, the writing will be there, waiting for you. As someone who only started seriously in her late forties, I’m living proof of this!

Don’t Give Up

Tricky. No, don’t give up the writing, unless there are other things going on in your life (see above) and you need to take a break. But if you have a finished piece of writing you’ve submitted to agents/publishers/competitions, and it keeps getting rejected, then maybe you need to take another look at it. Have you received feedback on it, and if so, what did the feedback say? I’m not suggesting it’s automatically time to bin your work, but particularly if the same kind of feedback keeps cropping up, there may be something you need to take another look at. Sometimes just the smallest tweaks can make a huge difference!

Show, Don’t Tell

Meh. Yes, of course, Chekov’s ‘show me the glint of light on broken glass’. But this has become such a piece of dogma, sometimes we forget that most times, we’re trying to tell a story. And unless we’re writing the most esoteric of esoteric literary fiction, that means balancing the need to build atmosphere/set the scene with the need to move the story forward. Sometimes – and it took me some time to realise this – instead of agonising over every description, it is perfectly fine to say, ‘He opened the door, and went outside.’

Make sense? I hope so. But if you disagree violently with anything I’ve said, that’s absolutely fine too. Honest. Because there is no magic formula, no single way to achieve your goal (whatever it may be) that works for every writer. In the end, I think all that really matters is that you enjoy where the journey takes you.

Thank you, Margaret!

 

 

 

Good Housekeeping Novel Competition

This rather wonderful, FREE, competition gives you until 30 March to enter the first 5,000 words of your unpublished novel (in the women’s fiction genre), a 100 word mini biography of yourself, and a full synopsis (no more than two sheets of A4 paper).

The prize is a book deal with Orion Publishing and a £6,000 advance.

You also need an original copy of the entry form, from January Good Housekeeping. While this edition is no longer available in the shops, you probably know someone who still has a copy – or might even be able to scrounge the entry form from a copy in your doctor’s surgery or hairdresser’s (please ask permission first!)
The winner of their last competition, Margaret Kirk, whose entry, Shadow Man, set in atmospheric Inverness, currently sits on our own bookshelves, wrote this page-turning whodunnit ‘on a chair in the living room with the cat on my knee’. I have the chair; I have the cat; what’s stopping me?

 

 

 

Unusually the competition asks for a hard copy to be sent to Orion Books, so give yourself enough time to interact with your printer. I’m actually looking forward to the nostalgia of queuing up at the Post Office with my brown envelope…

 

Good luck!