The Malt Whisky Murders - Natalie Jayne Clarke
This book coincided nicely with my renewed interest in whisky. It's rare that I pick up a novel so directly related to my current special interest, and I do wonder if that made me like this more than I otherwise would have done. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, but my impression of The Malt Whisky Murders is largely that it's just fine, and I wonder if I'd feel a little less positively about it if it wasn't directly leaning on my current obsession.
The protagonist of this novel - a woman who buys a distillery and finds two dead bodies hidden inside the casks - is a bisexual woman with ADHD. I have a weird relationship with the idea of "representation" in fiction, largely because I've never really seen myself in a book or on screen. And the rare times where I do, I find it uncomfortable rather than comforting. The depiction of ADHD here is a pretty good one, and tracks quite closely to my own experience, but the more real it felt the more unsettled I felt. Rather than feeling "represented" or "seen" I felt exposed, and I didn't like that at all. Luckily it didn't make me angry, like the almost offensive depiction of autism in All The Little Bird-Hearts, largely because it is a good depiction of the condition and the struggles that it causes, and so it didn't stop me finishing the book.
I did enjoy this overall, though I perhaps would have liked it to have a little more substance - some more twists and turns in the narrative and the investigation into the killings, a couple of red herrings here and there. It's a very straightforward narrative, and that's not really what I'm personally looking for in a crime novel. This is very much a "cozy" book in the modern sense of being soft, fluffy, and comforting, rather than in the more traditional meaning of cozy crime (though it's that, too). The result of that is that there's very little conflict, and we also don't get much of a payoff once we reach the denouement.
My favourite part of The Malt Whisky Murders is the fact that it's so clearly in conversation with the work of Iain Banks, albeit subtly. He's quoted in the epigraph - a line from a non-fiction book about whisky that I didn't know he'd written - and one of the characters references The Wasp Factory. The fact that large parts of the novel are told in the second person from the point of view of the killer seems to me to be a very clear nod to Complicity, which also happens to be my favourite Banks novel.
All in all I enjoyed this, though didn't love it. I'm possibly swayed by the fact that I'm currently obsessed with whisky, and also pleased to have finally read a novel at a normal speed for me rather than labouring over it for weeks as has been the trend recently. Hopefully this is a sign that my reading slump is over, and I can finally get back to working through the other CWA Dagger shortlists.