Someone Else’s Skin – Sarah Hilary

With ‘Someone Else’s Skin’, Sarah Hilary debuted with a bang on the crime fiction scene, winning one of the UK’s 2015 top crime-writing awards, the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year.

And deservedly so: it’s rare to find such a rich, balanced mixture of knife-edge plotting, tense suspense and clever characterisation in a first novel, crime or otherwise.

In my opinion the characters Hilary drew, and their personal stories, are the novel’s strongest suit. What can you write that’s new about a British police investigation team, especially one based in London? Enter Marnie Rome, a tough, clever DI with a very heavy burden to shoulder: the killing of both her parents by a 14 year old boy they were fostering. It happened five years before the novel’s action starts, but she’s still struggling, mostly with the reason why, so much so that she regularly visits her assassin foster brother in prison. Her side-kick, Noah Jake, is a young, gay detective of Jamaican origin: the fact that he ticks some of the Met’s political correctness boxes doesn’t detract from his professionalism, a mixture of dedication and enthusiasm that Hilary paints with a deft touch.

The investigative team is actually a virtual trio, Hilary adding Ed Belloc, a soft-spoken but determined Social Services psychologist and close friend of Marnie Rome. He’s called in after Hope Proctor, a young woman sheltering in a refuge for the abused in Finchley which Belloc works with, has stabbed her husband Leo. The refuge is the gruesome scene of the stabbing, and there Rome, Jake and Belloc are confronted with a sad, disturbed company of suffering women of all ages. Among them is young Ayana Mirza, also known to the police, who are trying to convict her brother of severing a man’s hand with a scimitar. The same brother who, together with two other siblings, held down Ayana and poured acid into her eyes for contravening family and religious customs and ‘looking’ at boys. Ayana is now a fugitive from her own family, and is trying to find the peace and time to improve herself out of her near-slavery condition.

From this brief sketch it must be clear that Hilary, a former bookseller who works part-time for a travel publisher in Bristol, pulls no punches in grabbing the reader’s attention. And she does it with great skill, both refusing to paint her characters’ plight in too purple a colour – it’s more a matter of chilling ‘normality’ – and gripping the reader from the outset not with a dead body, since Leo Proctor’s life is saved on the scene by Noah Jake and Ayana,  but with the cruel scars that failed family relationships leave on women, men and especially children.

As usual, I refuse to spoil readers’ enjoyment of a novel by going deeper into the plot. Suffice it to say that Hilary is as good with narrative tempo and plot twists as she is with her characters. In fact ‘Someone Else’s Skin’s other major asset is how well Hilary weaves her insights about the protagonists into her story. Not an easy feat, given the complexity of both plot and characters, but she does it without impeding the flow, making the reader care about her unusual but, sadly, very credible cast. Among whom, it must be said, there also is a perpetrator of incredible viciousness, one of the most disturbing and best-realised bad characters I’ve come across in crime fiction recently.

A second Marnie Rome novel, ‘No Other Darkness’, was published in April 2015, and I’m keen to catch up on lost ground and read it: if it’s on par with ‘Someone Else’s Skin’, we have a seriously good serial crime writer on our hands!