Sir Roger Parkes is a man of some influence in the West Country. When he loses touch with his youngest daughter, he has a word with the Assistant Chief Constable of the local force. It’s not a police matter, he is told, but if Sir Roger wants to pursue it privately, there is a lady who might be able to help – two of them, actually. As far as Summer Lane is concerned, she has enough problems without going into the investigations business with her next door neighbour; Mrs Emily Willows’ problems all seem to centre around the fact that her neighbour is refusing to go into the investigations business with her. They have reached, it seems, an impasse. Until, that is, Emily notices that someone has left a message on her answering machine…

Perhaps you can’t judge a book by its cover but I often do judge it by its opening pages. Reading ‘Arcadia”s opening pages was like stepping into quicksand. I was unexpectedly and irresistibly sucked into the story. It started with a small, silent group of people, gathered on a quayside in the pre-dawn dark of a December morning, the smell of the rising tide in the air and a small boat, visible only as a tiny red light on the water, approaching them from the island. The scene was described from the point of view of an unnamed woman who had stepped away from the group to watch the boat approach. The setting was dramatic but it was the woman’s thoughts about the four other people gathered on the quay that captured curiosity:

“…as far as she could tell, none of them had known each other before they met in the café last night. They had eaten a meal together – something she would usually have avoided – but there were good reasons why she should take a close look at them and hear what they had to say. They were young and excited, a little afraid, talking too much, revealing a little too much – two young women, Toby, who was also still in his twenties, and the other man, who told them his name was Rich. He was older, closer to her own age, and good at asking questions, getting them to open up without giving anything away about himself. She thought he was most likely a plant, already a member of the community.”

I’d opened ‘Arcadia‘ while browsing my TBR pile during a spell of insomnia, with no particular expectation other than a cosy read. As soon as I read the opening, I knew I had to continue with the book to the end. I wanted to know who the woman was, why she was there, what the community was and why she would suspect one of the group of being a plant.

The woman was Lane, who I met in ‘Lane‘ and ‘One-Way Tickets‘ but I hadn’t seen her like this before, back in her comfort zone, on a mission and under stress. I was settling into the mystery of what Lane was up to when the next chapter flipped me a month back in time, landing me in comfortable Cornwall and telling the story from the point of view of Willow, Lane’s next-door neighbour. The tone was domestic and tentative and drew me in because I knew that, somehow, it had led to Lane being alone on an isolated Welsh island amongst people she didn’t trust.

The narrative continued to flip between the island in December and Cornwall in November. This gave the story more texture. It maintained the tension through the growing sense of threat on the island while giving the story a realistic grounding and getting me engaged with the main characters and not just in the mystery. The first three-quarters of the book delivered a very a very plausible thriller that was winding up to an action-oriented finale.

I liked that the ending wasn’t over the top. We didn’t suddenly shift into a James Bond movie with the bad guys’ lair exploding as our heroes fled the scene. The outcome was tense and believable and fitted with the characters of the people in the story. I thought it was a good example of how to deliver something low-key but compelling.