Fields, Helen - "Perfect remains"

“Perfect remains” by Helen Fields

Plot

Inspector Luc Callanach is a good Franco-British policeman who worked for many years in France, at Interpol. For a bad story that he wishes he could forget, he had to change his life and move to Scotland, his father's homeland. Here, assigned to direct an investigative team, just installed and with the linguistic obstacle still to be absorbed, he finds himself having to unravel a very intricate case: among the burned remains of a Highland refuge, a few charred fragments belonging to a woman were found. The very few biological findings still usable for analysis trace the body to Elaine Buxton, a young civil lawyer from Edinburgh, who has been missing for a few weeks. The investigations start immediately between internal disputes within the team and a lack of evidence to evaluate. Who is it that savagely killed and set the poor woman on fire? Above all: can it strike again?
But Elaine is not dead: she is battered, brutally tortured, psychologically devastated, but she is alive and still a prisoner of the mad Dr. Reginald King who has a gruesome future in store for her and, unfortunately, for other victims to fulfill a hallucinatory project.
While Inspector Callanach struggles between the ghosts of his past and his powerlessness to quickly solve the mystery, his colleague and friend Inspector Ava Turner grapples with a painful case of babies left to freeze to death in a park. Due to a series of unpredictable coincidences, the two investigations will end up crossing each other, until the spasmodic and tragic conclusion of the story.

Comment

The novel tells a chilling yet compelling story: it is difficult to take your eyes off its pages and you would like to finish reading quickly to stop the subtle uneasiness that the story sows in the soul.
The author was able to arouse empathy, tension and the convulsive, spasmodic attention in the reader, despite having chosen a decidedly impervious path: the serial killer is presented to us from the very first pages. We know everything about him: his name, his methods, the reason for his insane impulses, where and with whom he works, how he chooses his victims and what he inflicts on them, where he hides them and what he aims at. As the investigators groped in the dark, the reader can follow the two stories unfolding in parallel without any veil to cloud the overall vision. Despite the absolute lack of mystery, the story manages to generate anxiety and expectation at the highest level, to the point of even passing over some probable inconsistencies and simplifications that, with a cool head, could perhaps make the most demanding ones turn up their noses.