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Remain Silent by Susie Steiner review – home is where the hurt is

<span>Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

What kind of crime fiction suits the mood of the lockdown? There’s a limit to how mean the streets can get when walked down in dutiful daily exercise; sparse clues to be found when everyone is taking strict precautions like seasoned serial killers. But at a time so closely focused on the vicissitudes of home life, DI Manon Bradshaw of Cambridgeshire Constabulary is on hand to examine the existential mystery of domesticity.

Remain Silent is the third in a series featuring this formidable Fenland sleuth, a wide-hipped, loose-lipped realist who cares little for others’ approval and admires “women who command the room and who don’t succumb to all the appearance bullshit”. This time Manon is investigating the death by hanging of a Lithuanian migrant worker, but her life away from the job is where the real trouble is. There’s the constant fatigue of the work-life balance, the soul-draining tedium of household chores and arguments – plus she’s struggling to keep the relationship with her partner Mark alive, knowing that cold comfort might be the best they can expect. As she tells a friend’s errant husband: “Marriage is a shit-show and you’d better start learning a way to navigate it.”

Manon’s world is a stark contrast to the grim milieu of the migrant Lithuanians. With harsh working conditions, violent gangmasters and squalid lodgings, the irony is that they seek the dull quotidian that eats away at Manon. Explaining an intrigue with a frumpy English neighbour, one admits: “It isn’t the sex, actually, with Elspeth. It’s the clean bed, it smells so good.” But an affair his friend has with the daughter of one of the local anti-immigration group leads to a brutal episode of domestic violence. In extremis, home is where the hurt is.

With multiple narratives and much internal commentary, Remain Silent can seem a bit too discursive at times. But Manon holds it all together, solving crime while digressing on feminism and comfort eating (it’s no surprise that the denouement rests on the consumption of a lasagne). She is an ideal protagonist for our times, not a goddess but a detective of the domestic, interrogating what is essential or non-essential in everyday life.

Jake Arnott’s latest novel is The Fatal Tree (Sceptre). Remain Silent is published by The Borough Press (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.