A dish well-cooked with Masterchef precision – Sarah Hilary’s Tastes Like Fear

The third book in the Marnie Rome series, after Someone Else’s Skin and No Other Darkness

It was immediately obvious, from the opening few pages of Sarah Hilary’s Tastes Like Fear, that this was exceptionally well-written, the antithesis of pulp fiction. The scene is set beautifully or rather, London is presented in all its ugly squalid stink and risk. There are some eloquent turns of phrase that never feel over-written or didactic. Like a bad but rogueish lover, London become an oily, fascinating and distinct character of its own, like Hardy’s Wessex. I have rarely seen a better and more tender portrayal of kids on those harsh London streets, too, vulnerable as a crab’s belly. The Lost Children. I did a tiny bit of work in the past with a charity called Railway Children, who dealt with homelessless and runaways. So Tastes Like Fear is real and reflects the situation as it is now. Characters are strong, self-contained and memorable. Our detective has a past, a past damaged by murder. It fuels her, pushes her forward – a classic example of how anger at a situation can be productive, valuable. As a reader bored with being spoonfed, I was grateful that here, I was given the intelligence to deduce for myself and that wonderful gift that is mostly seen in Nordic Noir (which this is not, but it is equal in quality and darkness) , the space to think about things. Marnie is a fascinating gal who really pours heart and soul into finding the missing, helping the families who have lost them. If I needed help, I would want Marnie on my side.

Think writing crime is easy? Try juggling enviable pace, psychological insight, three dimensional characterisation, believable dialogue and a plot that compels the reader to keep that book open. Alternating perspectives are tricky too but they keep things fresh, fast and intriguing. If Tastes Like Fear was a cake – it would be one of Mary Berry’s best. Pacy, punchy and powerful, with some unusual but spectacular and unexpected flavours – it also has another factor that makes a book into a novel with resonance – compassion. As we watch the odd and disturbing world of a killer, a killer for whom family has become a warped concept that makes sense in his twisted and constructed world, we are equally horrified and fascinated by him. Harm – our perfectly named bad man – compels us to look and listen to him even if we feel ashamed, like straining to look at traffic carnage.

There were so many characters that drew me, that existed beyond the scope of the book. Noah was charming and sexy too. I wanted him as my friend. As with all the characters, I felt that they were flesh, brain and soul.

After I finished Tastes Like Fear, I had to analyse for a while why I found it such a satisfying read, why I was happy to rip through page after page, neglecting everything else around me. Ultimately, it’s because I felt the author’s sincerity. Nothing was gratuitous and the lurch I felt in my heart as a mother when reading about the young victims was also genuine. I was connected. Hilary is fierce as a writer but empathetic, oozing an angry intelligence about human nature, our capacity to be truly bastardly to one another. It helps that this is done in strong, muscular prose. The reader is never allowed to be complacent and in this, there is one particular shock that I absolutely did not see coming. Want to hear the plot? Read it.

Ashes to Ashes Indeed

Most of us would love to believe that we are strange, mercurial creatures with an alien inside. The truth is usually more mundane; most of us are pinstripe prim – at least on the inside. But we grew up chafing against conformity – a single earring here, an attitude (that most didn’t notice) there. I went out around a small market town – Hereford - in bondage trousers and a combat jacket, with a punky bounce and I thought, a sneer. I was but a tiny tiny speck in the universe – a nothingness. Yet there was Mr Bowie – that voice seems to cleanse my blood and make me want to scale mountains while shouting down ‘see you suckers’ to the people below, spiky finger in the air to the world.

As a teen your emotions are undulating bloody monsters. Bowie in a single song could tap into melancholy, that disconnected anarchy that goes on in the black soul of an arrogant but terrified teen. He made you feel that strange was norm, that the normal people were the freaks. I had a very beautiful German boyfriend – Paul Schindler – who was an enormous fan. So, as with all of us, Bowie will mean a place, people we knew or attitudes we struck where we were most happy. Mine would be Berlin, I think, running up one of those high-ceilinged hallways to someone’s flat, or watching Marianne Faithful ride in black leather in Girl on a Motorcycle, in a shabby building in Berlin that had been turned into a cinema with seats from a bus. The wall had just fallen and it was an exciting time to be in the city.

Tomorrow I will be fine but today has been a rather discombobulated one and I have returned to adolescence – just for today, to indulge, to listen to a lot of Bowie. I was about to buy The Man Who Fell to Earth for my own teen but I am sure that they will show it on TV.

We all love the alien. We may never be alien and we can plod through our lives carrying our secrets and our stubborn strangeness. So thank you Bowie for all you gave us, how some of will share the grief and then we can smile and dance around to you. We won’t talk about Absolute Beginners and we won’t mention Tin Machine. We all make mistakes, my darling boy and we can forgive you much. For the songs, for the wonderful wonderful weirdness that made us all feel sane in our difference.