One of my pleasures is good – and I mean seriously good – crime fiction, and I’ve just finished Val McDermid‘s latest, Skeleton Road.  It’s a finely wrought reflection on the wars that destroyed the former Yugoslavia, notably the conflict between Serbia and Croatia, but it’s also shot through with ferociously smart insights into geopolitics.

In fact, the epigraph is from Gerard Toal‘s Critical Geopolitics (the book not the blog) and in her acknowledgements Val thanks both Linda McDowell and Jo Sharp.

I was particularly taken by the way in which the shadows (and lights) of international law and human geography fall across its pages. Neither becomes an abstraction; both are fully embodied.  Two of the protagonists are lawyers working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and another is a Professor of Geography at Oxford (who ‘forced herself to consider the entries she was due to contribute to the forthcoming Dictionary of Human Geography‘ – a perfectly reasonable motive for murder).

All of which may explain my favourite quotation from what is now one of my favourite novels.  I’ve always despaired of those approaches to ‘geography and literature’ that gut novels by ripping out the supposedly ‘geographical’ bits, so I hope I’ll be forgiven for this autopsic deviation.  This is Maggie Blake, Professor of Geography, describing the results of her fieldwork in Dubrovnik:

‘The work I ended up doing on the region and its wars … is rooted, as human geography should be, in an embodiment of the conflict.’