‘If We Were One’ by Paul Durston

Published by Diamond Books,
22 November 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-91564934-8 (PB)

This is a sequel to Paul Durston’s debut novel If I Were Me. Reviewing it last year, I referred to the ‘difficult and unsettling subjects at its core,’ and it being ‘as much a study of a particular mental health condition ... as it is an investigation of two murders.’ The same can be said of its successor, but this time that mental health condition is out in the open from the start. Indeed, as a preface to the novel there is a BBC news report from 2019 on Dissociative Identify Disorder (DID), the condition that dominates the story.

Having been left on the edge at the end of the first novel, we are plunged again into the search for retribution for those responsible for sexual crimes committed against PC Charlie Quinlan and her friends during their childhood. ‘These paedophiles have made me a killer .... Paedophiles have made me what I am,’ Charlie says at one point. In this novel Quinlan’s DID is set against the struggle between her two identities of Charlie and Lottie as well as her childhood alters, and the reader has to keep alert to cope with the constant, if clearly signposted, switches between them. Matters are never straightforward. At one point Charlie feels that she has been deceived by Lottie, and at times her friends have to try and understand whether they are dealing with Charlie or Lottie. There’s talk of integration between these two, but Charlie herself does not understand where her contrasting identities come from. When did they start? It’s unusual to follow a member of the police force and her friends in equally respectable jobs as they plan murder, but it helps them that Quinlan and her friend Wade both know ways of trying to evade suspicion. ‘To keep ourselves out of prison, we must minimise forensics, both physical and digital. We’ve done a lot to avoid leaving trails, but there’s more, much more, we can do,’ Lottie says at one point. Danger is in the air when Kathy, one of Quinlan’s colleagues, becomes suspicious and starts to research DID. The group of potential murderers plan their crimes in extraordinary detail. The end of the novel is extremely violent and, as with its predecessor, asks questions. The reader knows what has happened, but do the police? Does the last line hint at more to come?

If this all sounds complex, that’s because it is. I’m no physician or psychiatrist, but the effects of DID are written about convincingly and dominate the novel – and I hope I’ve conveyed that there is much more to the story. Durston writes in a vivid, almost breathless, style and the action bowls along at speed. I suggested in my review of his first novel that it was not one that I would probably have lingered over long in a bookshop if I’d just scanned the blurb on the back, but that I would have been wrong and was pleased to have read it. I feel the same about If We Were One.

Neither novel is an easy read, certainly, but I am very glad to have read both and suggest you will not be disappointed if you do the same.

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Reviewer: David Whittle

Paul Durston I retired from the Metropolitan Police Service back in 2012. In the View of a Constable was published when it wasn't ready. No one's fault except mine. If you do have a copy, please consider it a first draft of If I Were Me. I owe so much to Diamond Books who showed faith in my work and helped me get my book into a fit state for publishing.

https://www.pauldurston.com

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then. He is currently convenor of the Midlands Chapter of the Crime Writers’ Association.