This book seems to be cut right out of recent headlines. There have been a number of actual highly publicized cases in the last decade in which husbands have been suspected of murdering their wives and/or children. However, it's been difficult or impossible to prosecute any of these individuals because the bodies of their presumed victims can't be found. The husbands can continue to stoutly maintain that their wives must have taken the children and "run-off" with someone else.
This fiction of such circumstances starts with the discovery of a remarkably well-preserved body. The Torquay area police immediately set to work trying to confirm that this corpus delecti was once the wife of an arrogant lady's man whom almost everyone has long believed eliminated his whole family decades before in one cold-blooded spate of homicide. This book becomes, not so much a "who-dun-it," as a "how-can-we-prove-he-dun-it."
There aren't any particularly clever forensics here, or any brilliant Sherlock Holmes deductions. It's more a depiction of what has to be pursued as a routine investigation, with all the messy misunderstandings and conflicts between investigators that that entails.
Some of the best chapters in this book are the ones containing flashbacks to the lead investigator's childhood. Back then, her family's life was coincidentally intertwined with the current suspect's life. Paradoxically, his family was still intact then, although he was pursuing outside interests. Meanwhile, the investigator's family was disintegrating. Hilary Bonner does a good job depicting a penumbra of family dysfunction. Parents and child are becoming unavailable to each other. They were dissolving in distance and vague dissatisfaction in ways that many readers will probably be able to relate to.
This isn't a book of stunning revelations - but it will keep you interested.
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