A masterly plot twister: review of Peter May's Cast Iron

Riverrun, £18.99

Review by David Robinson

APART from the surname of its protagonist, a forensics professor at Toulouse University, Peter May’s Enzo Macleod series has nothing to do the Hebrides or his million-selling Lewis trilogy. Cast Iron is the last in the six-book series featuring his Scottish-Italian crime-busting academic and it ties up all the loose ends with professional finality.

The central conceit of the series could easily – had the technology existed at the time – have come straight from the golden age of crime fiction. Roger Raffin, a Parisian journalist, has written a book about France’s seven most baffling unsolved murders. Macleod – the French apparently pronounce it "Mac-lee-od" – bets him that all these cold cases could easily be solved through forensics and starts working on them.

By the time Cast Iron opens, five have been successfully solved, Enzo’s reputation as a maverick sleuth has spread far beyond his home town of Cahors, and the murderers in the last two cases are becoming increasingly edgy.

Case No 6 begins in the heatwave of 2003, when a drop in the water levels of a lake in south-west France reveals the skeleton of a 20-year-old woman who went missing in 1989. As she had just received a letter from a pimp subsequently jailed for the murder of prostitutes, and as she had been killed in the same way, she becomes one of the “Bordeaux Six” – six girls in the region who either disappeared or who were killed and whose deaths their parents and the police want to pin on the imprisoned pimp. Except he denies it, and Enzo believes him.

What with the Bordeaux Six, the five other cases Enzo has already solved but which are occasionally mentioned, and the seventh and final case – the murder of Raffin’s wife – still looming, Cast Iron’s plot doesn’t lack complexity. May adds to this by revealing that Raffin and Enzo shared the same mistress (though not at the same time), and that Raffin dropped her in favour of Enzo’s daughter, with whom he has a son. Confused? Me too. At one stage, when Raffin emerges as a suspect in the seventh case, the tangled web gets too much even for Enzo, who “shied away from the implication that the father of his daughter’s baby could have murdered his wife”.

May, who started his career on the Evening Times in the 1970s – Scottish Young Journalist of the Year, no less – has always been able to tell a good story, and doesn’t stint on research or description. He is also a master of the old bait and switch, able to lay plot misdirections with such care and cunning that while his readers are congratulating themselves on their ability to spot the murderer, the real one is already in the clear. He fooled me, anyway.

Cast Iron’s doubly-twisted plot takes us from the sleepy France profonde of Cahors and the demi-monde of Bordeaux to the heart of the French presidential race. If this really is Enzo’s last ride, it’s an enjoyable one.