Book review: Let the Dead Speak

IN Let the Dead Speak, Jane Casey’s seventh novel to feature London-based police detective, Maeve Kerrigan, Maeve is newly promoted to detective sergeant. 

But her latest case is a baptism of fire. When Chloe Emery, an unusually naïve 18-year-old, returns home from a weekend away to discover a bloodbath in the family home, all the signs point to the frenzied murder of Chloe’s mother, Kate — except there is no body.

This is a variation on the classic locked-room mystery, a police procedural into which Casey — previously a winner of the ‘Irish Crime Novel of the Year’ — blends religious fanaticism and sexism. As Maeve and her colleagues interview Kate Emery’s neighbours, among them Gareth Selhurst, a preacher in the Church of the Modern Apostles, she uncovers horrors behind the most respectable of middle-class suburban facades. “Yes, I do,” says Maeve, without hesitation, when Selhurst asks if she believes in evil, as Casey unapologetically etches the classic battle-lines of crime fiction into her plot.