The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and (which is not always the same thing) a pleasure to read. After that, it gets more complicated.
The book defies tidy categorisation. Set in a nameless eastern European country, it opens in the literary territory of the crime thriller, with private investigators on the trail of a government minister on the way to visit his rubber-clad mistress. One of them, the narrator Jonathan, is English. He’s furiously jealous of his employee Frank, a hunk who has had a fling with Sarah, Jonathan’s archaeologist wife.
In another case, the parents of a missing girl have retained Jonathan to search for their daughter, Petra. Here the story lurches into different territory, for information on Petra’s whereabouts comes from Gertrude, an elderly psychic with a marvellous line in malapropisms and an ailing Pomeranian named Phoebe; Gertrude, a self-confessed charlatan, believes that Petra is ‘in a small room she cannot leave’ and pinpoints the girl’s approximate location by burning a hole in a map of the city with the heat radiating from her hand.
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