There will be no new additions to Susie Steiner’s series of three novels featuring the Cambridgeshire cop Manon Bradshaw, a detective sergeant in Missing, Presumed (2016) and a detective inspector in the later novels. Steiner died aged 51 of glioblastoma in 2022. In the Acknowledgements to the third book, Remain Silent (2020), she referred to “my year of horrendous illness” and says that she has “faced an extremely frightening illness over the past year” (p. 358).

In the first book Manon Bradshaw is 39 years old, unmarried and childless. She’s investigating the disappearance of a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate student, Edith Hind. Unlike most postgraduates, Edith hasn’t been living in Cambridge itself but in a rented house in Huntingdon with her “preposterously handsome” (p. 20) and boring boyfriend, Will Carter, and her best friend Helena. There are signs of a struggle — broken glass and a small amount of blood — and the front door has been left open. Her phone, money and keys are still in the house. The detectives believe that if they don’t manage to find Edith within 72 hours it’s unlikely that she will be found alive. Edith’s father, Sir Ian, is a prominent ENT surgeon who has reputedly treated members of the royal family and is a personal friend of the Home Secretary. Because of this the investigating team expect to be put under additional pressure from above, but when Sir Ian eventually asks his friend to do something about the slow pace of the investigation, the Home Secretary is reluctant to intervene because of how it would look.

The 72 hours pass without much happening, then a body is pulled out of the Ouse near the Hind family’s country home. The body isn’t Edith’s, but that of a young mixed race male, who is identified as Taylor Dent, 17 years old, from Cricklewood. There is no apparent connection with Edith Hind’s disappearance, but because of the proximity of time and place the detectives assume that the disappearance and the death must be linked. Manon goes to North London to interview Taylor’s family and meets his mother, Maureen, an alcoholic Irishwoman with a terminal disease who doesn’t attend her hospital appointments, and Taylor’s younger brother, Fly, 11. Fly tells Manon that his brother had a plan to to get them out of their dire situation and that it wouldn’t have involved drugs, though he doesn’t know anything else about it. (It turns out to have involved blackmail.)

Manon is increasingly taken with Fly. She makes an arrangement with a nearby café to feed him and give her the bill. By the end of the book, when Maureen has died and Taylor’s killer been identified and charged, Manon has taken her inspector’s exam, transferred to the Metropolitan Police in Kentish Town, and is renting a flat in Kilburn, where she is taking care of Fly, who eventually agrees to being adopted by her.

She’s living a few doors down from the flat of her younger sister Ellie, from whom she had been estranged. When they were younger, they had been united in enmity to their father’s second wife, Una, who was very effective at keeping their father away from them. (Manon thought that Una had “subsumed him like some mollusc who crept over the top of him till he disappeared”, p. 354.) When Manon found out that Ellie had visited and stayed with their father and Una, she had felt betrayed and had avoided contact with her disloyal sister for three years. So, though the reader is barely aware of the fact until later, Ellie’s absence is keenly felt by Manon throughout most of the first book, towards the end of which Ellie contacts her to tell her she now has a baby, Solly.

By the beginning of the second book, Persons Unknown (2018), Manon has moved back to Huntingdon, taking Ellie and their respective children with her. Manon had not found North London to her liking. Though she’s now a DI, she’s working (on her own) on cold cases: the Major Incident Team, now apparently rebranded as the “Major Crime Unit” (p. 4), doesn’t have a place for her to return to. Manon is now pregnant, having bought frozen sperm online. She is conscious that, having had her heart so strongly set on Fly’s adoption, it might be seen (particularly by Fly himself) as a bit of a slap in the face to him that she is now just as determined to have her own biological child who will, of course, be white. Fly, now 13, is unhappy to have been uprooted and taken to live in a place where his is the only Black person in the school, and indeed in the neighbourhood. He skips school and goes back to Cricklewood for a day. When Manon tackles him about this, he says that he is planning to move back to London and live with his father, a Nigerian who, Manon knows, has a conviction for pretending to be a medical practitioner.

Ellie, too, is unhappy with the move. She’s a nurse and gets a job at Hinchingbrooke Hospital, but the NHS funding crisis is getting to be too much for her. She has been notified that she was accidentally overpaid to the tune of £5,000, and that she is required to repay the money, which she doesn’t have. Ellie has a plan to get herself and her son out of poverty but neither Manon not the reader learns about this till much later in the story.

Manon, who insisted before her reappointment that she would be happy with cold case work, is feeling isolated and dissatisfied. She is doubly removed from a central role when Fly is charged with the murder by stabbing of Solly’s father, the outrageously rich vice-president of a wealth management company. As the accused person’s mother and sister of the victim’s ex, she is obviously not allowed anywhere near the files on the case. Disclosure of the prosecution’s evidence will not take place for many weeks or even months, hampering her ability to investigate on behalf of the defence. And Fly has taken her off his authorized visitors list. On the plus side, she finds herself growing close to Mark Talbot, the solicitor she has engaged to represent Fly.

I noticed a number of patterns or motifs that recur in these novels. One is that each of them features a suicide (attempted, successful or apparent) by hanging. In Missing, Presumed, Helena, former best friend of the missing Edith, is beseiged by sensation-hungry journalists who have surrounded the entrance to her flat; she worries that the fact that she is seeing a psychiatrist will be exposed, and is left alone and unsupported over the weekend. Small and light, she hangs herself neatly by her dressing-gown cord from a hook on the back of her bedroom door, reminding us of the children in Jude the Obscure. Although in her 20s, Helena is not much more than a child.

In Persons Unknown (2020) Fly, detained in Arlidge House while awaiting trial, tries to hang himself using his bedsheets as a rope. Fortunately he is found almost immediately and suffers no serious or lasting injury. The third novel, Remain Silent begins with the discovery — by Manon, who is walking through the park with her four-year-old son, Teddy — of a body hanging in a tree. The body is that of Lukas, a Lithuanian who had been an agricultural workers based in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire fenland. The hanging would be treated as almost certainly suicide but for the presence of a note, saying “The dead cannot speak” in Lithuanian. But if it’s not suicide, there’s a mystery as to how the killer got the victim into the tree. One detective remarks that homicidal hanging is almost unheard of: if the intended victim is conscious, s|he would struggle and otherwise s|he would be dead weight. There was no evidence that Lukas had struggled.

Another repeating pattern can be seen in situations where a character pursues a desired object or state, achieves it at a certain cost to the him/herself and (usually) some of the people around him/her, only to find that the outcome isn’t nearly as satisfying as expected. So, Manon moves to North London, largely in order to live with her adopted son and to be near the sister with whom she’s just been reconciled, only to find herself desperate to return to Huntingdon less than 2 years later. Returning, she gladly accepts a role dealing with cold cases, only to find that she feels excluded from Major Crimes and that she and Ellie both hate the house they’re living in and that her son feels that she has failed or tricked him. Fly is keen to return to the North London environment he was used to and to live with his father, but that doesn’t work out and four years later he’s still living with Manon in Huntingdon.

Similarly, Ellie takes a serious risk to secure Solly’s future financial wellbeing. This necessitates their moving abroad (to Mexico to start with) but she soon finds that Solly is miserable, missing Fly (in particular) and Manon. But the most significant example of this pattern is found in the case of Lukas and his friend Matis. Matis persuaded his friend to move to rural England where, the ads promised, they could earn £350 per week for agricultural work. This turned out to be a brazen lie. In Wisbech, the Lithuanians were in a real sense enslaved, their passports and bank cards seized so that they couldn’t get away and had no access to the money that was paid into their acccounts, ostensibly as wages. This is how Bridget, the senior office on the Fenland Exploitation Team, describes their plight:

“Even though they’re effectively slaves, in terms of payment and conditions, they are there by choice. No one is locking them up. Often they have mental health issues, shady pasts, alcoholism. They think it’s work, so they get on and do it, but they don’t get paid for it. They are locked up by the language barrier, by their mistrust of authority, their dependence on the gangmasters for their basic needs. They get petty cash to buy deodorant or a packet of crisps, but no wage.” (p. 72)

In Klaipeda, Matis and Lukas had not been well off, but not impoverished either. It was boredom and a desire for a change of scene, not economic necessity, that had motivated Matis to persuade his friend to come with him to England, where they found themselves trapped and forced into dangerous labour with no let up.

Matis admits his mistake and feels guilty about it but its consequences aren’t limited to him and Lukas. The latter’s fiancée, Janina, who remained in Klaipeda, suffered a shocking acid attack intended to intimidate Lukas who had not been working fast enough and had been showing compassion to another worker who was forced to work with broken ribs. Like Manon, Fly, Ellie and other characters, the two Lithuanians had wanted a fresh start. To a far greater extent than the others, they found that their changed situation was much worse than what they’d had before.

Particularly, in books two and three, characters find themselves fighting against debilitating exhaustion. In Persons Unknown, where Manon is five months pregnant, there are constant references to Manon’s fatigue:

Flumping into an armchair, Manon felt her tiredness mingle with affection for her adopted son; so much older than his years …

She could sleep right now.

She could sleep walking up the stairs.

She could sleep stirring a pan at the stove.

The baby squirms, a bag of eels. (p. 9)

This is echoed in the final book, where Matis, Lukas and their fellows have to be out at a filling station at 4 am, often after just two hours’ poor sleep, waiting for a van to pick them up and take them to their job. This is Matis, after Lukas’s death:

Twelve hours in the darkness of an industrial chicken shed made him forget himself. The stink, the noise, being scratched, being exhausted. Perhaps Lukas is best off out of it.

In the van back to the house, his head lolls against the seat rest and he dozes a blank sleep …

He can see Dmitri is exhausted and would rather lie on his mattress, boots off. He is grateful to him for his companionship. (p. 13)

And Manon, four years after the birth of Teddy, hasn’t recovered her energy. At 46, she finds the weariness compounded by anxiety:

It’s not just the same old row about mental load, about who should be doing the utterly tedious bedtime routine while simultaneously preparing a nutritious dinner brimming with fresh veg, but the deep chasm over The Anxiety of It All. (p. 23)

She despairs of ever getting around to replacing the coat hooks which have fallen out of the wall beside the front door. In the meantime she and her family will store their coats on the floor. Worn out lightbulbs don’t get replaced, so “they live in an ever-increasing gloom” (p. 25).

I had intended to finish by writing a bit about the differences — in narrative approach, tone and sociopolitical themes — between Remain Silent and the two earlier books, but I’m already a whole day late with this post and I haven’t yet managed to work out what I meant to say. I may add a supplementary few paragraphs on these topics at some point but at the moment I can’t imagine doing so very soon. I hope you’ll have got something out of this in any case.

The next time I expect to take a look at a couple of novels by Mick Herron which are about something other than his “slow horses”.

Editions: Missing, Presumed, Borough Press paperback, 2016; Persons Unknown, Borough Press paperback, 2018; and Remain Silent, Borough Press paperback, 2021.