Book review: No hesitation in facing the ugly truth

'Little Bones' is number 10 in the Detective Inspector Lottie Parker series by Co Westmeath born author Patricia Gibney

Patricia Gibney develops the team surrounding Detective Inspector Lottie Parker throughout her series.

• Little Bones 
• Patricia Gibney 
• Sphere, pb €14.99 

Some writers refuse to include women victims in their work, and there is a competition, the Staunch Book Prize, which “rewards crime novels in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. 

Patricia Gibney would not be able to enter her 10th Lottie Parker outing, Little Bones, into this contest.

Gibney, it seems, agrees with the Scottish author, Val McDermid, who states, “not to write about it is to pretend it is not happening”. 

And as this title suggests, it is not only women who suffer violence in Little Bones, it is children.

Of course, in her birthplace of Co Westmeath, Gibney would know that there are many young women and their offspring in mass graves at the mother and babies’ “home” at Castlepollard.

The 2022 immolation of two children in a car fire set by their mother in nearby Multyfarnham underlines the occurrence of attacks against little ones. 

Violence against children should be written about, Gibney must think, or as McDermid says, we choose to “pretend it is not happening”.

This novel, first published in 2021, opens with an infanticide and the secret incarceration of the corpse under a fairy tree on a hillside. 

The newborn would have been better “stolen” away by fairies “to the waters and the wild” as the human child was in Yeats’s poem. 

Instead, for this little girl, “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand”.

Years later the bones are discovered, and Detective Inspector Lottie Parker searches for a link between them and cases in her current portfolio, involving abduction and murder. 

Two women’s bodies have been discovered with the scars of razor cuts on the soles of their feet and both have a razorblade in their possession.

In Little Bones, Gibney hints that her protagonist Lottie Parker has, in her previous iterations, had serious problems with alcohol. 

Now sober, she is struggling with many aspects of her domestic life, including tidiness, leading her to be envious of the clinically organised houses that she enters during her investigation.

But the absence of the homely mess of personal belongings indicates something amiss in the psyches of Isobel and Joyce, the victims at the centre of Little Bones. 

And maybe this mental aberration will prove a clue in the search for the perpetrator.

On the paperback’s cover are two short sentences: “Their mothers lied. They paid with their lives”. 

For two generations of children, the “kettle on the hob” of Yeats’s text does not “sing peace into the breast”; rather the “warm hillside” is an isolated place without the CCTV cameras that Lottie needs if she is to identify the criminals and bring them into custody.

Gibney has created a world of imagined towns and villages near Sligo, in which women are not only victims but competent professionals. 

Lottie has female colleagues on her team who contrast with the feckless and/or violent male suspects.

Men are the active villains: women the passive victims, but between these two extremes are decent, hard-working officers of both genders, endeavouring to catch those responsible for the horror.

In a series such as the Lottie Parker novels it is satisfying to follow a team developing work-based and personal relationships. 

Lottie herself is an engaging character, who fights her muddle at home, as well as the organised chaos of unread files and neglected leads in the station.

Readers of Little Bones may well be encouraged to obtain the first nine books and numbers 11, 12 and 13 already launched.