Death Under A Little Sky by Stig Abell

Jake Jackson has retired from his role as a detective and is the new found owner of Little Sky – a renovated farmhouse deep in the countryside and previously home to his Uncle Arthur. Jake left the MET and has recently separated from his wife Faye, so Arthur has gifted this legacy at just the right time. Whether it’s a temporary lull from the world or the hint of a new beginning only time will tell. When local vet Livia invites Jake to a village scavenger hunt where they search for a bag of relics. Yet when they find them, to their horror, these bones are very real and not ancient at all. Jake is enlisted by local police chief Watson to find out who the bones belong to and he stumbles across the death of a young woman called Sabine, a friend of his uncle. Sabine worked at a nearby arm and had gathered many friendships and admirers, but inexplicably fell or jumped from a balcony at the farm. People report a change in her mood and demeanour before her death. What had happened to her in the final weeks of her life? Jake becomes determined to find out whether this was an accident, suicide or murder. Someone wanted Sabine remembered, probably whoever took her bones from the mausoleum at the church and ensured a local would find them. Jake has to decide how involved he wants to be. Will his quiet self-sufficiency at Little Sky be enough, or will his detective’s brain need to be exercised? More worrying is how getting involved could put himself and others in danger, stretching new found and precious friendships to their limit. 

I can honestly say I fell in love with Stig Abell’s writing. This debut is right up there with my favourites in detective fiction – Val McDermid, Anne Cleeves and Elly Griffiths – and there’s a good reason why this sits beautifully with those female crime writers. It has that unique mix of an interesting case, alongside a poetic exploration of nature, personal growth and complicated human emotions including love. I find female crime writers do this mix so well and I don’t like crime fiction that’s all action and surface level relationships. This was perfectly balanced and could have been written specifically for me. Jake is at a really tough crossroads in life. He’s lost his uncle who was his only family, his job and his partner in life. Grief is definitely a factor in this huge life change. Arthur’s death has given him the financial security to put his life on pause. It’s allowing him to get to know his uncle’s life in a completely different way – by living it. He also gains insight from Arthur’s diaries and sketches. Jake builds a routine of his own gradually, but he doesn’t buy a television. Instead he listens to the jazz and classical music of Arthur’s vinyl collection and reads in his custom built crime fiction library. He starts to build new friendships, especially with Livia and her little girl Diana. There’s also local handyman Mack who helps him with new projects like the sauna down by the lake, Sarah at the village shop who allows him to use the phone and feeds him cake and Rose, a local rogue known only by his surname and a faint whiff of weed. There’s also the Doctor who seems to talk in Shakespeare quotes and helps Jake plant his first vegetable garden. I felt that Jake moved through a lot of his issues, time alone with his own thoughts helps that process. He has a daily routine of a run, followed by a swim in the lake and a shower, sometimes a sauna. I felt like he was slowly settling into a kind of peace, but now he’s found that calm will he ever be open to a bit of chaos and uncertainty? Even if the rewards could be amazing.

The setting is absolutely idyllic. Little Sky is this particular introverted bookworm’s dream. With no road to the property, acres of land, no internet or television it gives ‘quiet’ a whole new meaning. Who hasn’t waded through a day of texts, WhatsApp chat groups, news bulletins and wished the internet hadn’t been invented? Jake has a connection with nature that few get to forge. I once had a property with over an acre of land surrounding it and I could set aside whole evenings of chatter and streaming channels to watch my family of foxes playing in the orchard or letting the bats buzz passed me in the twilight. I felt so deeply grounded that I understood Jake’s reticence at letting the world back in. The case is what lures him into using technology, albeit away from Little Sky. He taps into old contacts and searches for details on Sabine’s death. The farm where she worked is run by a family, a mother with her two sons and her nephew. They are incredibly defensive from the start, convincing Jake that there’s something to hide. There are horrors occurring in the countryside, recently a few miles from us a traveller family were found to be keeping immigrants and people with learning disabilities for slave labour, keeping them in abject poverty and squalor, so nothing surprises me about rural crime. Jake is warned off several times, threatening his friendship with Livia. I had some patience with her point of view, she had her little girl to think of as well as Jake’s safety. 

The author has created wonderful characters and it was their absolute ‘human-ness’, if that’s a word, that made the novel for me. It showed that life in the countryside isn’t easy and can be very isolating, especially for a single young woman. Sabine has become the erotic fantasy of every man in a four mile radius, but it didn’t keep her safe from harm. Livia’s existing dynamic with Diana is well established, it’s the two of them against the world, so how could Jake fit into their lives, especially if he can’t promise to stay away from danger? I loved Jake’s getting to know Diana and the complicated feelings he had about having a child in his life. The whole concept of parenthood was explored with so much care and knowledge. I suffered recurrent miscarriage in my twenties and have never been able to have my own children. The author’s care as he delved into the pain and anxious hope of that experience was so deeply appreciated. It was interesting to consider it from the male perspective and it showed very clearly how it’s a journey that can tear couple’s apart. This experience obviously factors into how he feels about having a child in his life. Whether he can embrace the strange mix of chaos and routine that children bring remains to be seen. I loved how he related to Diana though, as a person in her own right, respecting their space as a twosome but also allowing them a stake in Little Sky – a gaggle of chickens named after Disney princesses (I’d call mine after 1970’s sit-com characters, Barbra, Margo, Sybil, Mildred and Mrs Slocombe). The book was leisurely , giving time to get to know the characters, explore Jake’s growth and recovery, and the building of new friendships. Then there are sudden flurries of action or violence that get the heart racing. Like all good crime fiction there are surprising reveals, but these things never take away from the reflective and intelligent feel of the story. I re-read this so I could go on and read the third book in the series and it still stands up so well. If I were ever to own a crime fiction library, Stig Abell would take pole position. 

Meet the Author

Stig Abell believes that discovering a crime fiction series to enjoy is one of the great pleasures in life. His first novel, Death Under A Little Sky, introduced Jake Jackson and his attempt to get away from his former life in the beautiful area around Little Sky, which was followed by his second novel, Death in a Lonely Place. This book is the third in the series, and Stig is absolutely delighted that there are more on the way. Away from books, he co-presents the breakfast show on Times Radio, a station he helped to launch in 2020. Before that he was a regular presenter on Radio 4’s Front Row and was the editor and publisher of the Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London with his wife, three children and two independent-minded cats called Boo and Ninja (his children named them, obviously).