Near Oxford, England new reservoir was created over a house. When, 20 years later, two divers on a lark swim through the house, they open a closet door and find a body. The body was the case that had bothered Bill Driver even after he retired from the police force. The discovery of the body brought back 20 years of memories for everyone concerned. This story is not my normal cup of tea but was a well crafted and different plot. ( )

I found this book on a librarians site in a category called reservoir noir. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, there are a fair number of books that focus on villages that were flooded in the ponds behind newly built dams. A couple of prominent ones in the category: Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height and Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season. Likeness in Stone is just as good. Martin is a new writer to me, but I'll definitely give her another shot on the basis of this one. The book is generally very well managed (stagecraft shows a bit too much here and there, but nothing too egregious) with lots of insightful interiority worked well into the plot. ( )

Martin sets her very compelling mystery in a dark and gloomy landscape. The writing beautifully captures the landscape dotted with abandoned barns and struggling farms: “The sky hung drab as a dishcloth , heavy and grey, bits of cloud clinging to it like scum from warm greasy water. It seemd to him a typical Thames Valley sky, as if Ernst Wachmann had somehow managed to transfer it along with the cattle, the tools, the vehicles. But one thing had changed: if his memory served him correctly, the first time he had come here he had experienced the feeling of being surrounded by wildlife, invisible to the eye but there – comfortingly there. Now, there was no such feeling, just the cold ploughed earth, the ironstone house and the prefabricated buildings located behind and to the side of it.” The gloomy setting perfectly matches the doomed story of three friends who – twenty years previously – were involved in the death of Helena, their seemingly perfect friend. Frumpy Joan, crazy Richard and soul-dead Ian each have their reasons for not wanting the past coming to light. A trio of policeman round out the principals: Driver, the retired police officer who was unable to catch a killer twenty years ago, Rigby, the young policeman assigned to the case of the recovered body, and Dalton, the senior policeman assigned to the case.

After a little research on the author – who at least from her pictures can not be said to suffer from Joan’s frumpiness – it would appear that Joan’s desperate desire to escape from her life of council estates (housing projects to us Americans) is based on Martin’s own history of living in such an estate during her childhood. Joan, the character in the book, is a former journalist and frustrated novelist. She has never managed to leave the awful neighborhood she grew up in despite aspirations to move to London and lead a life of glamour or at least middle class normalcy. After losing her job as a reporter for the Manchester Evening News, Joan works as a freelance writer in a squalid flat. “She consoled herself with the thought that writers were often notoriously unhappy in their private lives, particularly those who were reduced to writing features for downmarket magazines, and, whenever she felt bogged down by the frustration of writing features that rarely sold, she worked on the Book, that mysterious, ethereal, pageless thing that flickered on the screen of her computer like a ghost.”

A Likeness in Stone probably deserves 4 stars, however, I found the mood and resolution so relentlessly depressing that I couldn’t go more than 3½. The 3½ is probably unfair because the writing is truly wonderful. ( )

I picked up A Likeness in Stone because the author was recommended by Elizabeth George, one of my favourite mystery writers (although she actually recommended Martin's third book, The Long Close Call). I completely ignored the fact that this novel is compared to those of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters, two authors I carefully avoid as they don’t fit my rule of “no psychopaths or serial killers, no terror and no blow-by-blow descriptions of murder or its results.”

In the first chapter, divers find a corpse in a wardrobe in a submerged house—the dead woman turns out to be Helena Warner, an Oxford student who disappeared some 20 years before. This reopens a case that had remained unsolved despite the fact that the homicide detective in charge at the time was sure he knew who did it. There is no question that Martin writes well and if you enjoy Rendell’s or Walters’ mysteries, then you will undoubtedly enjoy this atmospheric (and creepy) novel as well. Despite the small cast of characters, the story kept me guessing until the very end and completely sucked me in—I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish it. However, it was too creepy for me (it definitely broke the above-mentioned rule), so unfortunately I’ll be staying away from this author in the future.

A slightly different version of this review can be found on my blog, she reads and reads. ( )

This is an elegant thriller about a 20 year old murder in the Oxford area of England and the secrets that bind the three young people whose friend, Helena, was brutally murdered. A retired detective who led the investigation at the time assist the police and does a little investigation on his retirement ( )