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‘Blood Mist’ delivered what I’d been looking for: crime fiction with a decent plot and strong characters set in a Liverpool that I recognised, but it didn’t stop there. It tapped deeply into emotions and ways of thinking that resonated with my upbringing in an Irish Catholic immigrant community on Merseyside. The result was a book that read more like a horror novel than a police procedural. It swept me along like a dream that I knew was becoming a nightmare but which I couldn’t wake up from.

The nightmarish quality of the story was produced by unleashing acts of terrible, merciless violence in a familiar environment. I recognised all of the Liverpool locations, even the mostly abandoned and unmapped tunnels that run beneath the city. The way the people spoke, the way they thought, and the humour that they used felt real and ordinary to me. All of which increased the shock of finding families butchered in their homes night after night, spreading a trail of malice through the snow-covered streets like a curse written in blood.

The horror in the story is increased as it becomes apparent that this isn’t a ‘Wired In The Blood‘, ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ sort of serial-killer story that invites the reader to step inside the twisted mind of someone who relishes violence. There is a greater evil at work here. One that tapped into my Catholic education. One that demands faith and obedience and sacrifice. These are things that I understand the power of and which I find much more menacing than any tale of supernatural monstrosities.

The central character in ‘Blood Mist’ is Eve Clay (isn’t that a name to conjure with?) who is the DCI leading the investigation. For me, she was the lynchpin that held the whole book together. She’s not like any other fictional DCI that I can think of. If you can believe in her, then you can believe in the whole book.

The book opens not with DCI Eve Clay at the first crime scene but thirty-three years earlier, with six-year-old Eve Clay being admitted into St Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children after the death of her guardian, Sister Philomena. How often do we first get to know a fictional detective as a child? I understood that Eve’s childhood must have a strong bearing on the story and I was intrigued to know what it was.

The first scene, where Eve is talking to Mrs Tripp, the head of the children’s home and a social worker, put me firmly on Eve’s side. Following her guardian’s instructions, Eve tells the two women that she will not accept adoption or fostering. Here’s what follows:

‘You either find my real mother and father and I will live with them, or I will live here until I come of age.’
The social worker turned to Eve with the look of someone seeing a ghost.
‘Eve, go and stand over there by the door.’
Eve did as she was told but didn’t take her eyes off the women, one slug-fat as the other was twig-thin. They both held up their hands to shield their mouths as they fell to whispering. As Eve watched the women leaning into each other, she wondered if Mrs Tripp’s desk was made from the same tree as Sister Philomena’s coffin. Eve, who could hear shadows fall on silent seas, concentrated hard on the hissing back-and-forth until it stopped and Mrs Tripp ordered,
‘Come back, Eve.’
Obediently, she returned, sat, and stared at her scuffed red toes.
‘So, Eve,’ said Mrs Tripp. ‘We’ll see how you feel about living with a family when you get a little older. You seem very set in your ideas for now. Is there anything else you’d like to say while you’re being so forthright?’
Eve looked up from the toes of her sandals.
‘I’d like to ask a question,’ she said.
‘By all means.’
‘What’s a bitch?’
‘Eve?’ Two women, one voice.
Eve turned her attention to the social worker and addressed her directly.
‘You just said, She even sounds like the old bitch.’
Mrs Tripp tapped the table hard with a biro. Eve met her eye.
‘Welcome to St Michael’s, Eve. We do not tolerate bad language here and we demand obedience in the name of Christ Jesus.’

Roberts, Mark. Blood Mist (Eve Clay) (pp. 4-6). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Eve as an adult is quiet, insightful, respected by her team and focused on her job and on the so-far-unsuccessful task of finding her birth parents.

She observes the crime scene with a compassionate detachment that allows her to seek out patterns without becoming blind to how terrible the annihilation of each family is.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that these ritualistic murders are partially performative and that Eve is the intended audience.

I admire the way Mark Roberts wrote ‘Blood Mist’. He demonstrated the horror of the violence in the story without making it glamorous. He drove the story through strong, credible female characters without making them into warrior queens. He demonstrated how faith, obedience and sacrifice can be twisted to achieve terrible things and he made me believe in the power of that trinity of traits.

‘Blood Mist’ worked very well as a Mersey crime novel. It excelled in creating Eve Clay, a woman who I found both believable and enigmatic. I’ve already bought, ‘Dead Silent’, the next book in the series and I’m looking forward to seeing what Eve does next.

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