This is an excellent journalistic thriller, set in Derry with enough local colour to assure any middle-class liberal readers that they are not in Islington any more.
Ask No Questions really is a novel about assumptions, both those of the leading characters and those of the gentle reader. Although many of the characters either know or suspect that there has been a frame-up and a cover-up, most of them have wasted a quarter century of their lives on one wrong assumption or another about just what that was. The police and the law are mostly in the background of the story, but their wrong assumption, as is sometimes the case in real life, is that somebody who is less capable of dealing with everyday life than the average man, is somehow going to be more capable of murder.
Murder is a talent which most of us lack, and in times of war the majority of conscript soldiers cannot bring themselves to actually aim to kill unless they are in immediate personal danger themselves; many of them cannot do it even then. This is why murder as a talent is sought after by organised crime, terrorist gangs and paramilitaries the world over. Even when the victim is a little girl, the search for a murderer needs to be a search for the rare talent which allows someone to kill another human being, not for the disability which sets a person apart, but which generally mitigates any harm they might do.
There is a cover-up as well as a murder and in this story the motive of the person who is instrumental to that cover-up is so surprising and unsettling that the reader probably won’t guess what it is until the very end. Murders can happen with very little motive, or at least the motive is often meaningful only to the murderer, but cover-ups always need a motive and that can be more shocking than the crime being concealed.
Ask No Questions by Claire Allan is published by Avon Books UK on the 21st of January 2021.
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