Cold in the Earth
Aline Templeton’s detective story set in the Scottish countryside during the Foot and Mouth epidemic.
The Scottish countryside is closed, cattle are being incinerated on massive pyres and human remains are uncovered near a Galloway market town.
Aline Templeton is one of a growing band of Scottish based writers, producing well crafted crime fiction, with page turning plots and convincing characters. Her latest novel in paperback is Cold in the Earth set in the farming community of Galloway in south west Scotland. An epidemic of Foot and Mouth disease is eroding normal rural life. Aline Templeton vividly recreates the despair of farmers caught in the devastating loss of stock and lonely quarantine of Foot and Mouth disease.
Her female detective is a human being to care about as her comfortable farmhouse family and steady rural policing are torn apart by disease and the shocking discovery of a long buried body. The novel opens with her contentedly feeding her hens on the farm, before she sorts out her bickering children for the school run. Then transformed into Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming, known as Big Marge to her team, we meet the efficient, ambitious and hard-nosed police officer.
We soon discover that all her work and success have been driven by the need to impress her chauvinistic father, whose approval she vainly craves. As she uncovers the dark family secrets of one of her own officers, the truth about the dead proves dangerous to the living. Marjory Fleming’s life is disintegrating around her as her investigation of an ancient murder becomes a hunt for a killer in the bleak and unforgiving Galloway landscape.
Aline Templeton compares with Ian Rankin and Denise Mina, two of the finest authors producing detective fiction in Scotland. Their characters inhabit real Scottish settings. They evoke, not just the landmarks of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Fife or Galloway, but the communities, their speech, their principles and their way of life. Like Ian Rankin’s Rebus and Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan, Aline Templeton’s Detective Inspector Marjoriy Fleming is a strong central character with a fragile personal life to drive the action of a gripping and malevolent plot.
