Nemesis
by Vincent Cobb
M-Y Books, 304 pages, paperback, 2007
Several years ago in the English Midlands, trainee police recruit Angela Crossley, still not quite out of her teens, was in on the culmination of a pedophile case. Some unknown had been abducting, raping and savagely murdering young girls. The killing might have gone on indefinitely had it not been that the mother of a pre-adolescent girl called Connie came to the police with the astonishing claim that her daughter was psychic and could help them. Angela, deputed to go through the motions with this obvious nutcase, was convinced despite herself, and sure enough Connie was able to guide the cops to the derelict site where the murderer had been dumping all the pathetic little corpses. Although the murderer was not apprehended, the discovery had the effect of getting him – at least so everyone hoped – to clear off into another part of the country. However, police insensitivity to Connie at the time of the gruesome discovery drove the girl into mental collapse ... and ever since she has been under psychiatric care. Her psychic abilities seem to have been scoured out of her by the experience.
Because of guilt or perhaps something more than that, Angela has been a regular visitor to Connie in the psychiatric hospital, and the two young women have become friends. Now it seems that Connie, her exploitative mother dead, may soon be well enough to attempt a return to the outside world, and of course Angela is keen to help her. Yet what neither of them could have predicted is that the pedophile psychopath has chosen this moment to return to the Midlands, here to renew his campaign of rape and slaughter ...
The writing style of Nemesis could hardly be more out of tune with the 21st-century American mode. This is not simply because it's a (first) novel by a British writer, set in Britain. Even in that country the style is an anachronism: ponderous, somewhat wandering, definitely amateurish. I was reminded of nothing more than the many hardback mystery novels issued by the leading British mystery publisher Gollancz in uniform yellow covers during the 1960s and 1970s. (Gollancz's books were also habitually packed with typos and questionable grammar, not to mention even misspellings. Presumably inadvertently, Cobb and his publisher have managed this further level of verisimilitude.) Many of the Gollancz mysteries were as slickly written as anything you'd find elsewhere, but a good many were not. That's not to say they were in any way bad: they simply harked back to a yet earlier age, the 1940s or so.
The amateurishness of the telling of Nemesis thus works for me in a way it may not work for others. First, the clumsiness of the writing reinforces the impression that we're reading not a novelist's artifice but the genuine record written by Angela, a bright but not especially bookish cop. And second, of course, the whole time I was reading Nemesis I was, as a Brit of A Certain Age, bathing in a warm pool of nostalgia.
In short, Nemesis has a very good tale to tell, but you may be significantly offput by the telling. It's very much a case of caveat lector. Me, I think you'd find this book worth the gamble.
—Crescent Blues