## Review Date #note/sourcereview/book | #source/book📚/fiction ## What is the story To prepare for our trip to [[Wales April 2025]], I embarked on reading books set in Wales. This crime novel accounts the origin story of DC Fi Griffiths, a detective constable in the Cardiff Police Department, and her emergence into the world of crime busting. This book is quite good! It tops the list of crime novels set in Wales on [Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/75150.Crime_Cymraeg_Best_of_Welsh_Crime_Fiction). While Fi empathetically and doggedly finds the killers of a mother and daughter living in squalor in Cardiff, she navigates both the underbelly of the city, the crime syndicate torturing foreign prostitutes, and her own difficulties with fitting in to a society that values people different than her. She discovers and dispatches both the killers and her previously hidden traumatic history. In doing so, she emerges stronger and more capable of feeling than she thought possible. When she comes clean with her Cotard's Syndrome, "Le délire de négation," she is able to speak her truth, come clean to her parents and her developing boyfriend, and her truth sets her free. ## What else do I wonder about? How do people emerge from trauma by becoming police officers and doctors and others that put themselves back in the space of trauma? ## Action When Cynthia and I travel to Wales, I will have in my mind the underbelly that is hidden, that exists everywhere. In Paris this most recent trip, I walked and walked, and at one point saw prostitutes just hanging out on a road. I was startled, this book empathetically places their raison d'être, largely their need to cover their trauma with drugs, and to pay for that treatment in whatever way they can. ## When do I want to stumble across this? [[Post-traumatic growth]], the idea that sometimes trauma results in a disorder, sometimes in a recovery and a growth. What helps people heal and turn their difficulties into a motivating aid? ## Source: Bingham, H. (2013). _Talking to the dead_ (1st ed). Bantam Books.