Book of the week
All the Wicked Girls by Chris Whitaker (Allen & Unwin) $33 I had little hope for this book. But the title is cleverly ironic and the book absorbing, dramatic and unexpected. It gradually pulls in the reader to the point where it becomes annoying to drag oneself away.
It is set in Grace, a small town in Alabama, and is told partly in the vernacular of the place. The first line, that sets the mood perfectly, is ‘‘There aint no meaning’’, said by Summer Ryan, a 15-year-old twin who is suddenly missing, but who remains one of the key voices of the story. Don’t be put off, even if you do not relish crime fiction written, to some extent, in local dialect. You will find this an exception.
Summer is the latest in a line of young church-going girls to be missing from Grace and other small settlements. The police have been unable either to find them or to find anyone responsible for the abductions. But Summer’s twin sister, Raine, is not prepared to wait for the law. She is the cleverly contrived antithesis to Summer, frightened of nothing, street-wise, experienced beyond her years in the various ways in which this is possible in small town Alabama.
So the tale unfolds, embracing a series of utterly believable but unusual characters. They centre on Noah, a young kidney-diseased teenager, besotted by Raine and anxious, between bouts of dialysis, to prove himself equal to his dead police father’s memory. And pastor Bobby, bright and reflective, with his wife Savannah who teaches Summer the cello. And Angel, the shunned albino son of another pastor who is viciously bigoted in his approach to the world and to Angel.
Apart from being a work of unforgettable crime fiction, All the Wicked Girls is almost a series of character studies of people one would find in the southern state of the US. In fact, this book could only be set in America, where the impact of cowboy philosophy is never far away, even presidential, and there are more guns than people. With a few exceptions, matters in Grace are dealt with by physical confrontation, where bruises and blood are a part of
It is satisfyingly compelling crime fiction.
everyday life. Whatever perfidies are enacted during the week, all is forgiven on Sunday in church, the threat of hellfire and brimstone working wonders for a few hours.
This is a book in which the dayto-day existence of ordinary people is stripped away to show what lies beneath. So it ranges from the vicious to the poignant, from the comedic to the truly tragic. It is satisfyingly compelling crime fiction that leaves one somewhat saddened and curiously nostalgic about the better moments in life. With this, his second book, Chris Whitaker is here to stay.
– Ken Strongman