Dead As Gold

LoveReading Says

Rooted in the real world, in the present day, Bonnie Burke-Patel’s Dead As Gold is a poetic, propulsive crime mystery that’s also laced with timelessly resonant fairy tales, including that of a pair of princes, which shares a striking moral: “be careful of the skin you wear, for it is better to be a poorly clothed human, than to don the pelt of a wolf”. 

Simmering with mystery, the story is partly centred on Adam, a goldsmith who fashions objects from fairy tales in Morrow-on-Sea after turning his back on a crazy life in London to be close to his young son. The same town has also drawn a writer to its shores — Ophelia, a woman whose complicated relationship with her mother and resulting “toxicity of feeling, entanglement, dependency, resentment” derives from something that happened in Morrow when she was a teenager.

Adam and Ophelia meet when she enters his studio to sell beautiful, valuable rings that were a gift from her mother. Around the same time, Adam receives an animal’s heart in the post. A figure appears at his window. A bear fashioned from gold is stolen from his studio. Other items are taken too, including Ophelia’s. 

Brought together by gold and the burglary, the duo also bond over fairy tales — timeless, endlessly reinvented stories that are “mutated in the telling. Carrying fears about poverty, loss, violence. Dreams of love and riches.” Adam and Ophelia are also entangled by the investigation into the crimes, which rises to a chilling, startling dénouement.

Cleverly reframing classic crime fiction to weave a richly-layered story of family secrets and feelings of abandonment and rootlessness, Dead As Gold also offers stirring perspectives on love, and riding waves of change. As Ophelia notes, “There’s only so long you can do what you’ve always done”.

Joanne Owen

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