It starts in Portobello, Edinburgh’s seaside, in 2019, at a disused boarding house. It is years since proprietor Isabella Dawson last had a paying guest, at least two years as that is how long her body has lain undetected in the upstairs bedroom. As well as being a recluse, she was a hoarder, and with no relatives to be found, the Office for Lost People get involved and engage specialist cleaners to clear the place.
Enter the first narrator, cleaner Essie Pound, who sifts through the old possessions with an acquisitive eye for the curious rather than the valuable. As she uncovers elements of Isabella Dawson’s life, she also reveals her own uncomfortable back story.
Later in the book a second narrator, or point of view, that of PC Emily Noble, is introduced. She is trying to work her way back into favour after making a couple of mistakes in her short career in the force, one professional and one personal, which just adds to the baggage she carries from traumatic childhood. She gets given many a rubbish job, and her latest directs her attention to the old boarding house.
Essie and Emily, unknown to each other, have a lot in common. Their pasts give them both issues and now each, independently, rummages in the debris of Isabella Dawson’s life, peeling back the generations and cycles of birth, death, comings together, splittings apart, and unsolved disappearances. If only they compared notes …
It has a feel of a Kate Atkinson, but not so well done (no shame there!). Attention is needed to keep track of the plot threads that deliberately mirror or echo each other, but that is rewarded with a satisfying denouement.
A good companion
piece to the previous and excellent Inheritance of Solomon Farthing, and the
heir hunter himself makes a cameo appearance here. (As does Margaret Penney of
the Office for Lost People, who featured in Paulson-Ellis’s first novel – The Other
Mrs Walker – which I now feel obliged to read).
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