The Moon’s More Feeble Fire (The Dr Jack Cuthbert Mysteries)
This is the second in Allan Gaw’s Jack Cuthbert series. The next two will follow later in the year. Gaw had already self-published all four books before they were taken up by Polygon to be released in 2025.
The great strength of the series is its technical authenticity. Like his protagonist, Jack Cuthbert, Gaw is a forensic pathologist and wrote textbooks on the subject before becoming a novelist. He not only knows his stuff, but he knows how to communicate it. The stories are also strong on context. In this book the context is the sex trade in Soho in the 1930s, before it was ‘cleaned up’ in the ‘50s.
The disappointment, for me at least, is that the plots are so improbable, not so much technically but from the unlikely motivations of the killers. The culprits also give in too easily under interrogation and wind up the case with a fulsome confession.
Nonetheless if you are fascinated by forensics this is the series for you. Gow takes the reader through a post-mortem in unflinching detail and shows how much it can reveal of the cause of death and the way of life of the deceased.
