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If
you like stories with zombies in them you may enjoy Unmarked
Graves. The story
begins in Africa, but the biggest part
of
it is set in England, in the fictional town of Darworth. The
town
has seen a recent explosion of racially motivated crimes and
investigative telejournalist Nick Pearson has decided that
he wants to go to Darworth and do a show about it.
Nick needs to do some preliminary investigations before he can do his
show though, and he feels that having a camera crew in tow may put
people off from talking to him, so he travels to Darworth alone. Nick's
reasoning is sound, but his boss is a little worried about Nick being
alone in the town because Nick is black and his colour might
make him a potential target.
It does not take Nick long to discover that the African refugees living
in the town distrust the local authorities. They feel that they are
victimised and that nobody cares. Local thug Stephen Kirkland
sees things differently. He feels that the black are allowed to get
away with murder. Kirkland tells Nick that his brother was killed by a
black man and that he believes that police did not investigate the
crime as thoroughly as if a white man had been responsible.
Detective Sergeant Martin Bishop, on the other hand, denies that the
police discriminate in any way. Bishop tells Nick that he is interested
in the crimes not the colour of peoples skin. Bishop is an important
character in the story and he is kept very busy. When some of vehicles,
belonging to refugees, are torched in the night, it is Bishop who is
put in charge of the investigation. But what starts out as a case of
arson becomes a murder inquiry when a body is found in the back of one
of the burnt out vans. Matters become further confused when the
pathologist's report reveals that the man did not die in the fire, but
had already been dead for three months and that there are some strange
x-shaped marks carved into the body. It is a good job that the
pathologist got to work on the body so quickly because it goes missing
a few hours later. The police dust for prints of course, but the only
prints that they find belong to members of staff; with one exception:
they also find the corpse's fingerprints. This rather strange incident
adds further pressure to the overworked Bishop because he now has a
case of body snatching to contend with as well.
As I stated earlier, Bishop is an important character, but Nick is the
central character in the story and he and Bishop begin working together
after Nick discovers that the local cemetery has been desecrated.
Strange thing have been done with the corpses and some of them bear
similar marks to those one the corpse from the burnt-out van. Nick has
seen similar marks before, when he was working in Liberia and he has an
idea who may be responsible: a man name Victor Mowende. Mowende is a
practitioner of a type of an African voodoo called Uthalande and the
last time they met, five years ago, Mowende tried to have Nick killed.
Unmarked
Graves is a very dark story
and the very first page begins with a mutilated body in a bath and
Shaun Hutson is a writer with excellent descriptive skills so I would
not recommend the book to readers who are squeamish or faint of heart.
If you are already familiar with Hutson's work though, you will have an
idea what to expect.
I would not say that any of the characters in Unmarked Graves
are particularly lovable. They are okay, but, as a reader, I never grew
to care about them a great deal and I consider Unmarked Graves
more of an idea driven book than a character driven one. It is a scary
book though and my favourite scenes occur in the final chapters when
Nick and Bishop are exploring some condemned flats that are situated at
basement level underneath the flats where the refugees live. It's dark
down there and although the décor is bad the smell is worse
and the creatures that are causing that smell are the stuff of
nightmares.
Unmarked
Graves is 310 pages long and
the book also has a few additional pages that contain an interview with
Shaun Hustson and a one chapter teaser for the Charlie Huston
novel Already
Dead.
List of Shaun Hutson books reviewed on this
site
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