An old convent is bought by a property development company. Soon, work begins on the grounds, but it’s not long before the skeletal remains of forty young women are discovered. The bones are old – years, sometimes decades – but it begs the question: what, exactly, happened at the convent, where girls with nowhere to go were taken in? Why were the secretly buried, and why did their families receive no word of their passing? The ReMIT team, specialising in serious crime, investigates, though why exactly is unclear: this case is a far cry from their normal jobs. Moreover, the team is still reeling from the loss of their boss Carol and is now adrift. Who put the bodies in the ground? Could it be… THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?
I mean, that’s not much of a spoiler. They’re not getting off scot-free here. Yes, there are evil nuns and an arrogant priest. Nothing new under the sun there.
How the Dead Speak is a weird book in the sense that it has a lot going against it, but I found myself enjoying it anyway. For one, McDermid crams about eight different plotlines into one: the dead girls are one, but then more bodies are discovered separately, this time those of adult men and much more recent. There’s another subplot about Carol, stringing her life back together after the loss of her partner Tony, who is now in prison for murder; and about Tony, making his life in prison; and about a new recruit on the ReMIT team who appears to be somewhat incompetent at her job but very competent at sucking up; and so on. It might have worked better if they had been strung together more coherently, but oddly, I didn’t really care that they didn’t. Some plot lines work better than others; Tony’s life in prison is a bit heavy on the clichés and the end is underdeveloped – it feels like a very long-winded way to get him to a certain place – and I didn’t care so much about Carol. The Catholic priest and nuns are all predictably vile – there’s no love lost between McDermid – and it’s terribly unsubtle, but also kind of satisfying to read about.
Likewise, the return to these characters feels like a cheat – the last novel ended their story pretty definitively – but if it’s a cash grab by the author, then good for her. I didn’t like the idea in theory, but in practice, it was good to see how they’re all doing.
In fact, that’s my entire experience with this novel: it’s muddled, convoluted, cramped and crowded, but also fun and deeply satisfying. Granted, some of the plotlines feel a little unfinished or rushed, but others work just fine. You want Tony and Carol to have their redemption, even only marginally. You want the perpetrators to suffer. Inasmuch as a book about child abuse can ever be soothing, this did the trick.