Laudable series
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently spent some time re-reading the four books and two novellas Sharon Bolton wrote about Detective Constable Lacey Flint, who works for the London police, sometimes with a murder team, other times undercover and, in one book, as part of the River Police who patrol the Thames.
Lacey is an iconoclast, part of that subgenre of mystery characters known as loners. She attempts to be colorless and matter-of-fact, to keep her head down and fit into the team; but she has so many secrets of her own to keep that it’s a relief to be able to focus instead on the secrets of others, on the methods and madnesses of the serial killers she hunts. As a young, new, and inexperienced detective, Lacey is extraordinarily unlucky about attracting the attention of these criminals to herself. There is some sort of affinity between Lacey and her prey that causes some among her fellow officers to be over-whelmed by the suspicion that she herself is the criminal they are seeking.
In the first book, Now You See Me, Lacey serves as a source for “her” team on the history of the Jack the Ripper killer, whose scenarios, methods, and exploits the murderer they are now seeking seems to be mimicking. What becomes clear as the team follows this killer further into the labyrinthine twists and turns of serial murder, however, is that the Ripper similarities are camouflage for something much more sinister, and that Lacey is at the center of the story. The rarity of this and the other books in the Lacey Flint series is that the mystery keeps unfolding in each, all the way to the last page.
In Dead Scared, Lacey’s sometime mentor and reluctant crush, Detective Inspector Mark Joesbury, asks her to go undercover as a student at Cambridge University to explore the inexplicable uptick of bizarre suicides on that campus. Given her fragility since the recent end of their last case, her boss, Dana Tulloch, and other members of the team are concerned that Lacey will be overwhelmed by the necessity of playing this vulnerable part. But Joesbury thinks she’s up to it, and she’s the obvious choice, given her youthful appearance, so she immerses herself in campus life and tries to discover more about the raft of lonely and insecure students who chose such unconventional methods of death. It’s an insane plot, fascinating (and misleading) to the last page, and full of peril for more than just Lacey.
In Like This, For Ever, titled Lost in the United States, Lacey is on leave from her job, and considering not returning to it. She hasn’t been able to process the jumble in her head created by her last case, and is spending most of her time obsessively working out and taking long late-night walks to exhaust her enough for sleep. I can’t say too much about the plot of this one, because it takes an unusual twist at about 85 percent that I don’t want to reveal, but it’s written with Bolton’s usual skill and panache. Because Lacey is on leave, she is not directly involved in most of the police investigation of a serial killer who is targeting young boys. But the usual crowd (Stenning, Anderson, Mizon, Tulloch, Joesbury) are all on hand, and Lacey inevitably gets drawn in by an unexpected personal involvement with a seemingly peripheral character, the boy next door. There’s lots of suspense, with multiple red herrings and a great resolution.
A Dark and Twisted Tide once again involves Lacey Flint in spite of herself. After her leave of absence, instead of working as a detective she has gone back to uniform as part of the river police, hoping to return gradually to the force, but quiet time is not in the cards. Only Lacey could be out swimming at high tide in the Thames River (a hobby she has taken up since moving onto a houseboat) and discover a body floating in the river wrapped carefully in white burial cloths. Soon it becomes obvious that she didn’t find it by accident, that once again someone is focused on her, trying to draw her in. Being Lacey, she lets herself be drawn. This one, I have to say, was a little weird in spots even for me—but I enjoyed it. I had two problems: First, I think it’s time for Bolton to take up a new story line with regard to Lacey—not every case can relate specifically to her! Second, the long-drawn-out non-courtship of Lacey and Detective Mark Joesbury can’t be prolonged beyond a point, and I think we just hit that barrier as readers. To quote my British friends, at least give us a little snogging!
The two novellas that Bolton wrote for this series exclusively as
e-books are equally compelling and mysterious. In the first, If Snow Hadn’t Fallen, something happens in Lacey’s neighborhood that weighs on her mind, because none of the explanations for it add up to what the killers attempted to convey. The second, Here Be Dragons, which falls at the end of the series, is a long-needed exposition of Mark Joesbury, detailing one of his undercover cases and leaving us, finally, with a cliffhanger regarding his relationship with Lacy. There have been two stand-alone books written and published since the #4.5 novella with the tease at the end; when, oh when, will we discover the outcome?
One of the things I like about this series is that Bolton has nicely combined two separate mystery subgenres. Her protagonist is a lone-wolf type, and we get all the fun that goes along with that; but the books are also pretty comprehensive police procedurals, detailing all the myriad ways in which the police go about solving a murder. This gives the lone-wolf concept a nice, solid background on which to rest.
These books are beautifully written, with a wealth of detailed description of the characters, the neighborhoods of London, and the beauties of the natural world that make themselves known even
along the dreariest parts of the river Thames. Both the characters
and the mysteries are sufficiently unique and well developed that
I would venture to say if you are a Tana French fan you would love these books.
They also remind me of Carol O’Connell’s series featuring Kathleen Mallory: Lacey Flint is likewise a damaged, somewhat amoral police detective who does everything according to her own instincts regardless of policy and logic, and gets “up people’s noses” even though she has no desire or intention to do so. I think Bolton has been wise, however, to vary her oeuvre with completely unrelated stand-alones; O’Connell’s Mallory has a distressing sameness from book to book as her series unfolds, and Bolton could fall into that trap with Lacey if she focused solely on her as a protagonist. That’s not to say I don’t want more of Lacy, because I do! But I will wait at the pleasure of Ms. Bolton and meanwhile enjoy everything else she has written, which is considerable.
Glacial thrills
No matter where she takes you or what unlikely scenario into which she drops you, Sharon Bolton never disappoints. I first discovered her when I picked up one of her stand-alone novels from the new books shelf at the library a few years ago, and I haven’t missed one since. I equally enjoyed her four-book (and two-novella) series starring Detective Inspector Lacey Flint.
I recently received a notice from Goodreads that Bolton had published a new novel, but when I went to check out the e-book from the library, it was a three-week wait. Undeterred, I put it on hold and decided, while I waited, to reread the Lacey Flint foursome plus novellas. I managed to read books one and two and the first novella, but received book four while waiting for book three and didn’t want to go out of order, so I read something else. Then The Split, her new one, became available, so I enthusiastically jumped over to that.
The story begins with Dr. Felicity Lloyd, a glaciologist (yes, there is such a thing) who has been living in Antarctica on the remote island of South Georgia for the past nine months. She is part of a research team there to study flow and the draining of lake waters as the precursor to the breakup or “calving” of glaciers. Although this research is the dream job of her career, Felicity has an additional reason for retreating to this forbidding landscape: Her ex-husband, Freddie, who abused her terribly while they were together, has written to tell her that he is out of prison and wants to see her. Although Felicity feels fairly secure at her post at the end of the world, cruise ships do arrive from time to time, and she watches their manifests scrupulously. When the Storm Queen faxes over a list of passengers with Freddie Lloyd’s name on page five, Felicity knows she has to take drastic action to escape him. She packs up and heads for a deserted mining town on the other side of the island. Freddie follows, but is foiled in his attempt to get to Felicity by a woman named Bamber, who confronts him, gun in hand…
At this point, we are transported back 10 months to Cambridge, England, where Felicity lives and works at the University, and where she has just received the offer to go to South Georgia. Only one impediment stands in the way of accepting the job: She has recently been attacked, but has no memory of who hurt her or why, and the University has mandated that she see a therapist. Unless she can convince the therapist to sign off on her good health, she will lose this amazing opportunity, which is also the perfect hiding place from her past. Dr. Joe Grant, her therapist, realizes she is trying to manipulate his diagnosis, and the better he gets to know her, the more troubling her problems become. Dr. Grant is, himself, recovering from the loss of a woman with whom he was working as part of his pro bono community service, while his mother, Delilah, a police officer, is pursuing the killer of two homeless women.
During the next six weeks red herrings abound, and ultimately you don’t know who to suspect of what, and why. Bolton does her usual good job of keeping her reader breathless with anticipation at each turn in the road, and provides the unexpected at every one. Fast-paced, well written, and exciting, this is a twisty thriller made even better by its vivid descriptions of its unusual landscapes and the careful delineation of each character. Sharon Bolton, as I discovered when I read her last published book—Dead Woman Walking—can get you to believe practically anything, no matter how unlikely, and The Split reinforces that assessment.
Journalism & crime
On May 26th, a surprise arrived via my Kindle. I had completely forgotten that I had pre-purchased Michael Connelly’s new novel, Fair Warning, to be delivered as soon as it was published, and suddenly there it was! I had another book mid-read, so I have just finished it.
Connelly leaves the world of Harry Bosch to hark back to gonzo journalist Jack McEvoy, the protagonist of two of his former books, The Poet and The Scarecrow. Although I read both of those books when they came out (I have to date read 34 of Connelly’s books!), it’s been such a long time that I toyed with the idea of revisiting them first before proceeding with the new one, but chose to forge ahead. Although there were a few references to the previous cases in this one, it essentially read like a stand-alone for those who hadn’t read them, so that was fine.
As well as being the title of the book, Fair Warning is the name of a non-profit consumer protection news website run by Myron Levin (which actually exists in real life). Jack is a reporter for this website, which feels like something of a come-down from his former hard-hitting crime beat for the L.A. Times (and his authorship of two best-selling books), but he is quick to point out that consumer reporting is a vital service to the public, especially in this age of accelerating scientific discovery, and that many major papers (the L.A. Times and others) pick up and run with his stories. Maybe he protests too much?
The beginning of this story, however, isn’t professional, it’s personal: Two homicide detectives show up at McEvoy’s door with the news that Tina Portrero, a woman with whom he had a fun, slightly drunken one-night stand (a year previous) has been brutally murdered, and he is a suspect. Jack cooperates to the extent that he provides a DNA sample in order to eliminate himself from their list of “people of interest”; but then, because of a curious mind and an eye for the anomalous detail, McEvoy gets ahead of the detectives on this crime and a bunch of related ones.
The method of the murder (which I won’t mention here) is so dramatic and so extreme that McEvoy researches it, and discovers that this method appears in widespread cases; then he notices that the murderer may have been using personal data shared by the victims themselves in a particular way, to select and hunt his targets.
At this point, McEvoy has ceased to think of himself as an accused murderer and started to see the potential for a really big story that involves solving the murders of a bunch of women, zeroing in on a serial killer, and even calling the government to account for lax practices in data protection. So he decides to reach out to his former lover, Rachel Walling, whose FBI profiling career he burned the last time they collaborated, to see if she can pull some strings for him.
Instead, Rachel jumps into the middle of his quest, perhaps to curry favor with and return to the FBI fold, helping Jack’s information stream but also setting up all kinds of conflicts of interest.
A big part of the story here is the moral quandaries in which the various characters find themselves. McEvoy does want to identify the killer and facilitate his capture; but he also wants to break his story, which means he can’t hand over all his information to the police until he “gets the scoop.” He and Rachel Walling have a chemistry between them that didn’t disappear with their falling-out years ago, so there is a motivation to perhaps rekindle that. In addition, Walling has been pursuing a necessary but boring job since she left the FBI, so the prospect of handing them a serial killer ignites her with the ambition to prove them wrong for firing her. A colleague of Jack’s at the website, who is added to the story by his editor, wants to make a name for herself without treading on Jack’s toes too much to do so; and Jack realizes that although he is the better researcher, she is the better writer, so he reluctantly acquiesces in her involvement but then keeps throwing her under the bus. And of course the police want to be the first, last, and final arbiters of what happens with this case, story scoop be damned. It makes for an interesting level of tension throughout the story.
Connelly has pulled off a gripping, fast-paced tale whose interest level is enhanced by having a reporter, rather than a detective, at the helm. Some of the true-to-life details of data collection and (the lack of) government regulation are chilling, and he also fills in the reader on some aspects of operating on the dark web, as well as providing the usual details of his Los Angeles setting that are fun for those of us who live here and recognize them. I enjoyed this book, and it was a nice change from the Bosch litany.
And no, I have no idea why there is a black bird (a crow? a raven?) on the cover.
Procedural?
I just finished reading The Cold Cold Ground, the first book in the “Detective Sean Duffy” series by Adrian McKinty. The book was published in 2012, and although I had never heard of it, it won a couple of fairly prestigious awards. A friend on Goodreads thought highly of it, so I decided to check it out. I love getting stuck into a good mystery series, especially when its setting and time period are a bit unusual.
This one takes place in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, at the height of “the Troubles,” which is to say when the country was a battleground for multiple nationalist groups on both sides of the Catholic / Protestant fence, against each other and also against the vilified British government. Sean Duffy is a police sergeant, a recent hire to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and a rare Catholic in a sea of Protestants. He doesn’t seem to hold his faith in particular esteem, but that fact doesn’t matter to the “Fenian” haters all around him, so he has a lot of proving of himself to do on two counts—being the new lad, and being an outsider.
Duffy doesn’t let it worry him overmuch, although he does do a daily check of the undercarriage of his car for bombs before he sets out each morning. It’s an odd period in history in which to set a police procedural because, with every street a potential hazard due to IEDs, gunmen, or just unemployed teenagers throwing cartons of milk and bricks at your car, it’s hard to concentrate on one particular crime. But Duffy does have a crime assigned to him, and it is itself an anomaly—it seems he may have a serial killer on his radar. He and his crew, nicely described and developed in the course of the novel, are investigating the deaths of at least two gay men who have been killed, mutilated, posed, and labeled by the murderer, as well as drawn to the police’s and media’s attention by a series of notes. Sean initially falls for the allure of the first serial case ever to crop up in Northern Ireland, but then begins to suspect there’s a deeper story that has little to do with a hatred of homosexuals and more to do with political undercurrents amongst all the players on scene.
The descriptions are first-rate, the characters compelling, and the action fast and violent, while the writing doesn’t suffer because of the pace. I enjoyed the story from beginning to end, but can’t help but note that this is not an ordinary police procedural. Although Duffy and his mates do a conscientious job of exploring all the clues (sometimes at great risk to themselves), the inferences Duffy then draws from them proceed mostly from his instincts and sometimes wild beliefs than they do from any evidence, which is sparse. The leaps of faith that he makes (and that the author apparently expects you to make along with him) are sometimes a mile (or would it be a kilometer?) too far. Add to that an ending in which Duffy steps far outside his persona as a policeman in order to obtain justice and this book doesn’t dwell very well within its subgenre. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging story, and based on it I would read another by McKinty.
Unreliable
The book I read this week is a fairly classic example of a story told by an unreliable narrator. It is also written in epistolary form, which is to say in the form of a letter to another person. You might also view this book as an example of Victorian Gothic, although it takes place in 2017, because of the setting and some of the events.
A narrator always serves as a filter for her story, and if that story is told in first person, then the only person’s viewpoint we are able to discover is that of the storyteller. As readers, we generally believe that the narrator is truthful and is providing, as far as she is able, an accurate view of the story. But an unreliable narrator is one whose version of the story the reader comes to realize cannot be trusted; there is a point in the narration at which the reader discovers there are lies involved, a hidden agenda is revealed, or the nature of the narrator is discovered to be criminal, crazy, naive, pathological, or any other aberration that would call the person’s views into question. Motivations are revealed that cast doubt on the narrator’s veracity, and the reader has to decide whether the narrator is being willfully deceptive, or is just deceiving herself.
Whatever the case, it takes a certain level of skill to write an unreliable narrator that readers will continue to follow even when they have discovered this deceptive nature. The protagonist in The Turn of the Key, by Ruth Ware, is one such character.
The book opens with a set of incomplete letters, each addressed to a solicitor, a Mr. Wrexham—impassioned pleas for him to listen to her story, to believe her, and to defend her. Rowan Caine is a nanny sitting in jail awaiting trial for the murder of one of her charges. She already has an attorney, but believes (with some justification) that he is one of the reasons she is behind bars, and is looking for someone who will hear her out instead of dismissing the (admittedly odd) details of her story as irrelevant. Eventually she manages to push through all her false starts and put the events down on paper for Mr. Wrexham.
It proves to be a disturbing and convoluted explanation, with multiple reveals as we discover that Rowan is not who she pretended to be, on at least two separate levels. It also furnishes plenty of questions about the motivations of the other characters, but once you realize that she has lied about some significant events, you are provided with many reasons to doubt her experiences.
The story’s gothic elements arise from the setting, which is an old Victorian mansion set in the wilds of Scotland that has been bought and massively but jarringly remodeled by a husband-and-wife team of architects. The front half of the house maintains its pristine Victorian façade and ornate interior, while the rear has been demolished and replaced with an über-modern structure of cement and glass that provides a jarring disconnect when moving from one part of the mansion to another. And it also turns out that when the mansion was stripped and refinished, certain secrets of its architecture remained unknown to the builders, while other aspects of the house are almost too well known through its surveillance app that provides a view and a microphone to almost every room.
The couple in question, Bill and Sandra Elincourt, have four children—a teenager, an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, and a toddler. They have gone through four nannies within the past year, and are looking for someone qualified, reliable, and without a surfeit of imagination or superstition to take responsibility while they are pursuing their busy careers. Enter Rowan Caine, beguiled by the generous salary, the beautiful house, and the apparently well-behaved children. But when the Elincourts take off for a few weeks of conventions and client meetings, things begin to disintegrate, starting with the behavior of the children and ending with a series of strange events that may or may not be related to the remote controls installed in the house.
This is a suspenseful story, with vivid description and a gripping, slightly ominous feel throughout. The story builds to its conclusion, which is both cryptic and satisfying. The only thing I am pondering is whether I loved or hated the ending. It’s plausible, it explains much, but the result it implies is vague enough that I had to read it a couple of times to decide what I thought and whether I believed it.
For readers who are looking for a thrill, who enjoy a tale with twists, and who embrace the ploy of an unreliable narrator, The Turn of the Key will satisfy.
Buh-bye, Jack
A brand-new Jack Reacher novel came out in October and, lulled by my positive experience of reading the last one, I enthusiastically put my name on the holds list at the library and jumped right on it as soon as it appeared on my Kindle. That’s the last time I will be doing that.
The book starts out like a typical Reacher story: Reacher is riding nowhere in particular on a Greyhound bus. A man on the bus exits, and is about to be mugged for his money; before the mugger can get away with it, Reacher is off the bus behind him and taking care that the mugger gets away with nothing. Then, with (previously) charactistic kindness, he offers to help the old man, who is shaken up and injured slightly, to get home. In the course of the action, he gets the old man’s tale, which is a sad one, and decides to see if he can help him in some small way.
The interesting part of the plot, to me, was that the old man’s money troubles were due to a sick daughter with no medical insurance, and the parents were struggling to pay her bills, ultimately resorting to borrowing money from the local mob as each test and treatment mounted up into the tens of thousands of dollars. Ah hah! I thought, Child is going to address some actual drama from real life, the way he did in the previous topical Reacher novel about opioid addiction, only this time Reacher’s going to take on the relentless rule of insurance companies over healthcare in America. Good for him! Alas, that theme disappears rapidly into a battle, instead, between Jack (on behalf of the impoverished family) vs. the loan sharks.
The plot takes a turn that honestly no one—even a diehard fan of these books—could believe. With a little help from a “petite, gamine” bar waitress, her two supposedly laid-back musician friends, and their buddy who used to be in some branch of the military, Reacher takes on two rival gangs, one Albanian and one Ukrainian, who between them have split control of the town and all its under-the-table dirty deeds. He ostensibly does this simply to get the old man’s money back…but he goes about it like an avenging angel focused on obliteration, and that’s what he achieves.
We are used to seeing the Jack Reacher who will take on five bullies at once, and put them down in the interest of making an impression; but we are not used to the Jack Reacher who carries four Glocks on his person and kills indiscriminately. I daresay there are at least 60 corpses in this story directly attributable to him, and maybe 10 of them could have been classed as self-defense. We are used to the Jack Reacher who befriends and has a casual romance with a woman in the course of his adventures; we are not used to the woman being an enthusiastic party to wholesale slaughter—Bonnie to Reacher’s Clyde—with a gun of her own and no apparent moral compass. We are used to the Jack who occasionally makes a friend and turns him into an ally, but in this book he does this with three men so nondescript and so obviously meant as mere foils and backup as to be nothing more than cardboard characters. Every time he referred to one of them by name, I had to stop and think, Um, who is that again? is that a Ukrainian? Oh, no, it’s Reacher’s ally. Right.
By the end of the book I was sickened by the callous and matter-of-fact killing of practically every character to whom we had been introduced. The Reacher of yore would have initiated some discussion at first, at least, but this one is bent on destruction. Where is his measured compassion and sense of fair play? The ultimate decision he makes in the last few pages, once he has achieved what he promised for the old man, was so out of character as to be ludicrous—and disturbing. And then he and his woman enjoy a cozy interlude back at her place and think to themselves, Better them than us! Really?
I am finally done with this franchise. I have been lured back several times by a return to the Reacher who acts for justice, a minor vigilante assisting the downtrodden who can’t act for themselves; but that man has morphed into a monster, and no longer exists. I will never trust his character again. Mr. Child, with this one you have truly jumped the shark.
A reach
I wish they were all like this…
I started out by reading a large swathe of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, as one does when first enamored of a character, and then, after I grew bored with reading them one after another, I continued to dip in here and there whenever I was in the mood and/or there was a new book out. The one truth in picking up a Jack Reacher book is that you never know what to expect. Well…
let me revise that statement: One ALWAYS knows what to expect in terms of the character, because he’s a pretty reliable personality. But I have been both pleased and massively disappointed by the stories/events surrounding him from book to book, so although I approach the familiarity of the series with pleasure, I still have some uncertainty about whether or not this particular book in my hand will be a good read.
I liked The Midnight Line quite a lot. The premise (finding the owner of a precious West Point ring spotted in a pawn shop window) was a good one, and just quirky enough to be a typical Reacher quest. While there was violence committed in this book, it wasn’t nearly as vicious as it sometimes can be; it felt like Reacher stuck to his inner code of responding rather than initiating (which he has not done in several recent disquieting examples). I also enjoyed the “educational” aspects of this plot, including facts about the state of Wyoming, and the opioid epidemic and how it has played out in this country, particularly as it affects veterans. Reacher’s collaboration with a male partner (a former FBI agent turned private investigator) was refreshing, since it didn’t contain the now almost obligatory “hook-up” portrayed in many of the Reacher stories featuring a female lead. In fact, Child’s treatment of the female characters in this book (the FBI guy’s client, the local police detective, and the veteran owner of the ring) was respectful and their characters were well developed.
I agree with some that the other characters’ impressions of Reacher (in panicky phone calls to colleagues and subordinates) as “Big Foot” and “The Hulk” and Child’s own descriptions of his turkey-sized hands and so on are probably a not-very-subtle swipe at the temerity of casting Tom Cruise in this role for the movies. Although Cruise has done his best to pull off the stone-faced confidence and world-weariness, there’s no denying that he can’t intimidate or make an impression compared to an almost-seven-foot specimen of honed Army manhood. I must confess that the Jack Reacher projected on my mind’s eye as I read bears more likeness to Alexander Skarsgård…
Elly Griffiths
The Stranger Diaries is an interesting mix. It is a contemporary version of a Victorian Gothic novel; there is also a story within the story, which brings the past into the present and makes it relevant again. It’s the only stand-alone novel (that I know of) by Elly Griffiths, who is best known for her Ruth Galloway archaeology mysteries set in the wilds of Norfolk (most of which I have enjoyed quite a bit), and a series called Stephens and Mephisto (which I haven’t read—yet).
The diaries mentioned in the title belong to Clare Cassidy, a divorced English teacher with a 15-year-old daughter named Georgia. Clare teaches at a local comprehensive, Talgarth High, on the coast of Sussex, which includes an old building that was formerly the home of a reclusive Victorian writer. R. M. Holland was most famous for a short story entitled “The Stranger,” a murder mystery with which Clare became fascinated, and which led her to decide to write a biography of its author. She also occasionally teaches the story in her upper-level English class, which means there is a fair degree of familiarity with it amongst both staff and students.
The set-up for the book includes the typical Gothic trappings: Holland’s wife, Alice, was rumored to have fallen to her death from the staircase of the house that descends from Holland’s study on the top floor, and is said to haunt the school; the legend is that if Alice’s ghost is seen, the incident foreshadows a death. The atmosphere is amped up by the location of the book in moody Sussex, with dense sea mists, lonely downs, and abandoned factories.
Clare’s friend and colleague Ella Elphick is found murdered, accompanied by a note that is a quote from “The Stranger.” The police investigation is led by Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur (herself an alumnus of Talgarth High), who initially suspects Clare, until other events take place that seem rather to target than to implicate her.
The book is alternately narrated by Clare, DS Kaur, and Clare’s daughter, Georgia, and the story grows quite complex, due both to the variety of narrators with their markedly different points of view and insider knowledge, and to the proliferation of interesting and potentially sinister secondary characters. It also grows wilder and more strange as it incorporates echoes of the Victorian past. I never guessed the murderer, but greatly enjoyed trying to figure out who it could be, as my potential suspects kept meeting an untimely end!
DS Harbinder Kaur was a great character (she and Georgia both introduce some humorous notes that are a nice contrast to Clare’s slightly hysterical tone), and I’m hoping perhaps Griffiths will bring her back in subsequent books, now that she has established such a thorough back story for her.
I hesitated to review this book right now, because it would be so much more effective if you were to read it in October, just when Hallowe’en is approaching! Perhaps you should put it on your list and revisit it then for maximum creepiness.
Dark deeds
I am a big fan of the books of Sharon J. Bolton. A mystery-reading friend turned me on to her and (being a little obsessive in my reading methodology) I decided to start with her debut, Sacrifice, written in 2008, and work my way forward. Her protagonists are women in unusual professions and offbeat settings, and the books cross that line from mystery to thriller, almost to gothic. They are definitely dark, but also compelling enough that I have been undeterred by subject matter that might make me stop reading another writer’s book.
I like both her series, featuring Detective Constable Lacey Flint (yes, British), and her stand-alone novels, which encompass a far wider array of characters and situations, with settings from Dorset to the Scottish border to the Falkland Islands, and plots that range from mistaken identity to serial killers to something eerily reminiscent of Children of the Corn. They are uniformly well written, well plotted, and harrowing to various degrees.
After having read her latest,
The Craftsman, I concluded that the name of the book should rather be reserved for its author. Bolton is truly a craftsman of storytelling, and her latest is even creepier than some of her former offerings, which I wasn’t sure was possible.
The central modus operandi of the killer in this one is something I wasn’t sure I could persist in reading about, it horrifies me so much. If it’s not your worst nightmare, it will be after you read this.
The character of WPC Florence Lovelady, a green but smart and enterprising 22 years old in 1969, immediately engaged me, particularly her trials with smoothing it over and dumbing it down in order to operate as a policewoman in those misogynistic times (not that things are leaps and bounds better today…). The setting—
the bleak beauty of northern England—was likewise captivating.
And the mystery was topnotch, wandering as it did from past to present and infecting the reader with certainties and doubts in almost equal measure.
In 1969, three teenagers have gone missing (one at a time, over a period of months) from the small town of Sabden. There is speculation each time one disappears that they could be runaways, out there in the world somewhere doing just fine; but after the third disappearance, the police (and particularly newbie Lovelady) are starting to think otherwise. Detailed to follow up on the claims of some children who swear they heard a voice coming from a recent grave, Florence makes a horrifying discovery that starts her on a chase that will make her career…and change her forever.
In 1999, the death of the imprisoned serial killer brings Assistant Commissioner Lovelady back to town, in company with her son, to attend the funeral. But subsequent events suggest that what she thought was buried in 1969 with the confession of Larry Glassbrook may just emerge from the grave to haunt her.
This is apparently the first of a trilogy, with the next book not due out until October of 2020. I don’t know if I can wait…
Reacher
Past Tense is Jack Reacher book #23, by Lee Child. I read a bunch of the books in this series in long-running binges, and then got tired of them and went away for a while. But after reading a surfeit of quirky and thoughtful mainstream fiction and some angsty teen fantasy, this was the straightforward, somewhat creepy dose of suspense I needed in the moment.
The Reacher books are, admittedly, pure formula, but when it’s a good formula (as with so many mystery or suspense series), it’s easy to go with it. Jack Reacher is former military police, but in a way he’s been ruined by his career. The typical nomadic existence of military life, constantly picking up sticks and moving to a new base, a new assignment, doesn’t lend itself to putting down any roots. People who retire from that either react by finding a home and never leaving it, or they remain perpetually restless. Reacher is an extreme example of the latter, roaming randomly and impulsively back and forth across the United States with no baggage but a toothbrush and no transportation but his thumb stuck out by the side of a highway. (If he gets work and makes some money, he occasionally takes a bus or train.) Because of a combination of his background training and his hardline personal ethics, no matter where his curiosity leads him, Reacher inevitably becomes embroiled in some local trouble and acts as a knight errant to help the innocent and punish the guilty.
If you’ve seen the two movies starring Tom Cruise, most faithful readers will tell you that you haven’t met Jack Reacher. There was major outrage when he was cast, since Jack is a rangy six foot five in his stocking feet, 220-250 pounds, with blond hair—scarcely a description of the tough and enigmatic but nonetheless short and dark Cruise. I always thought, if he’d been 30 years younger, that the recently deceased Rutger Hauer (the replicant from Blade Runner) would have been good casting. Ironically, when she first sold the film rights to Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice had pictured Hauer as perfect for the role of the vampire Lestat, which role Cruise also bogarted, to his and everyone else’s eternal regret!
In this particular book, there are two parallel story lines that persist throughout and only come together near the end. Reacher’s part of the story is initially fairly benign; with autumn coming on, he is departing soon-to-be-chilly Maine with plans to take a zig-zag path that will eventually land him in California for the winter. He puts his thumb out and gets a ride that promises to take him a good ways on his first day, but then the driver’s business calls him back to town, and Reacher is stuck out in the middle of the New Hampshire woods. A road sign for Laconia, New Hampshire decides him on his next leg; he’s never been there, but recognizes the name from family stories as his father’s birthplace, and decides to explore for a day before continuing his journey.
Meanwhile, a young Canadian couple is traveling to New York City to sell something valuable and parlay that into a new life in Florida; but car trouble sends them limping down a long country lane in search of assistance. From the minute Shorty and Patty arrived at the out-of-the-way motel, their old Honda knocking and backfiring, and met the four co-owners, I knew something was up; the guys’ bouncy, friendly affect was too much like Mormon missionaries at the door to be for real. The elaborate web of lies they wove to keep Shorty and Patty from going anywhere kept amping up my nerves as I waited to see what was intended for these two, even as they rationalized and justified their way from uneasiness to optimism and back again. The whole story line was fraught with anticipation.
At first, I assumed Reacher’s part of the story was simply designed to put him in the neighborhood of the hotel when it came time for whatever terrible thing was going to happen there to require his services. But his accidental and fairly casual research into his father’s small-town origins revealed more and different facts than he expected, puts him up against a couple of tough customers, and leads to some trouble of its own.
Although some people thought both story lines were drawn out too much, I really liked the switching back and forth between them as a vehicle to build suspense. The situation with Shorty and Patty eventually blows up, and Reacher is instrumental in his familiar role as a fixer. Despite a few departures from Reacher’s usual modus operandi, I enjoyed this quite a bit—it kept me reading until my Kindle died at 1:30 a.m., and I recommenced at 7:30 after the Kindle (and I) had recharged! There’s something to be said for a recurring theme with individual characteristics enlivening each iteration!
The Book Adept 