Elena Forbes has just finished fighting her way through London U.K. traffic after visiting a contact at the Metropolitan Police Service. She’s been discussing the gritty details of yet another book she’s working on featuring Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia. “I spend a great deal of time on research with a number of contacts from the Metropolitan Police and Forensic Services to make sure that the details are as accurate as possible” she explains. “I want it to be as grounded in reality as possible without getting bogged down in details. The research has to serve the story.”
Our Lady of Pain involves an intricately woven plot that finds Tartaglia and his partner Sam Donavan struggling to solve the gruesome ritualistic murder of Rachel Tenison a successful London art dealer. The more the detectives learn about their victim they more they are forced to reassess their initial conceptions of who she was and why she was murdered. Taking place three months after the events of Die With Me the first book in the series the action plays out while Tartaglia and Donavan are still dealing with the fallout from that case. Winding through London streetscapes and the bureaucratic mazes of the Metropolitan Police department Our Lady of Pain steadfastly refuses to romanticize modern police work.
Two novels into the series Forbes clearly has a strong idea about who her characters are and what motivates them. From the uncompromising and driven lead detective to his emotionally fragile partner Donavan the members of the Barnes Murder Squad are full-bodied credible characters whose complexity stands in stark contrast to the lazy caricatures of certain genre writers. That being said Forbes assures that she’s careful to withhold some details to allow readers a role in envisioning the characters.
As important as characterization is to her stories London itself plays a large role in her fiction. “Tartaglia’s city is very real” she says. “Being a Scot of Italian extraction allows him to be an outsider in London which gives him an interesting viewpoint. Readers get to see the city through his eyes.”
Forbes says she has a detailed plot for a fourth book sitting on her desk and that her most recent visit to the police station planted the seed of what will likely become a fifth. Her writing brings crime fiction to a welcome new level with taut plotting and a psychological approach that shows her to be more concerned with the “why” than the “who” of the genre.
