Jake Jackson has been a detective, mainly working cold cases, in London. His marriage has dwindled and he and his wife Faye part ways, and he leaves the force. Why he leaves we don’t really know, although he gives us an info dump at the start. Biography background is better told as conversation, but there isn’t anyone to talk to where he’s headed.

DEATH UNDER A LITTLE SKY by Stig Abell is set in an isolated village in deepest England, with hills, sheep, and lakes. Jake’s tale takes up as he arrives at the house and land he inherited recently from his rather eccentric Uncle Arthur, Little Sky. Devoid of mod cons, the cottage has an extensive library of detective fiction. After he’s settled in and got used to washing in the lake, Jake finds an unsolved local case thrust into his hands.  

So much of this account, told in present tense, is strange. I don’t just mean finding a woman’s bones on a supposedly innocuous treasure hunt. Most people with sufficient funds and a free cottage would immediately get a proper electricity connection, not a shiftily rigged wire that’s likely to electrocute someone or get the place struck by lightning, besides stealing power. They’d get a phoneline connected and buy some appliances. Jake just runs around the lake and chats to Livia the vet and her young daughter Diana if he happens to meet them. Few of the locals are kind, apart from Livia, just Dr Peter, the hedgerow biologist. All the farmers are dour and want cash in hand and exploit hard workers on the farm. There’s no tourism, the local police must know there are drug dealers but do nothing whatsoever about it, and there’s a small church but no resident vicar.

Stephen, or Stig, Abell is a journalist I used to see reviewing the next day’s newspapers on Sky News. He edited The Sun tabloid and from there moved to The Times Literary Supplement, and this is his first fiction novel. While DEATH UNDER A LITTLE SKY is a crime fiction, the crime element feels like a long time coming. Literary descriptions and musings about detective novels fill a lot of pages. This is a complete contrast to today’s journalism which looks for strong headlines, clickbait, and snappy quotes. The atmosphere shifts from pleasantly rural to gothic, with violence and menace accumulating fast in the last third. Abell has a few laughs at local newspapers but demonstrates that a serious journalist accumulates a lot of background. I found Stig Abell’s first novel interesting. DEATH UNDER A LITTLE SKY will appeal to fans of gothic crime in an isolated setting.