The kids aren’t alright
Crime is not limited by gender or age. Men, women and children can all end up behind bars for committing criminal acts. Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Many jurists advocate that laws be reconsidered periodically to determine whether they are still applicable. Some turn into the Blue Laws of yore, still on the books but no longer enforced. Others get overturned.
A case in point is the banning of alcohol in the US in 1920. So many people broke that law that it was finally rescinded 13 years later. Marijuana laws have similarly been criticised. The prevailing attitudes appear to be changing. Time will tell. Even with so many laws being revised, perpetrators of serious crimes like robbery, rape and murder still fill prisons.
Devil worship, human trading and sacrifices are so horrific that they are played down by the media, their adherents labelled “evil”. The citizenry is so irate at the blood lust of those arrested that they want to tear them apart.
Yet what if the evil ones are children themselves? Do they deserve leniency? In One More Lie by Welsh writer Amy Lloyd, age is taken into consideration, but it’s not just a tap on the wrist. Charlotte, who as a preteen is involved in the horrific murder of another child, gets a new identity, psychiatric counselling and a band around her ankle to monitor her movements. Finally, at the age of 28, she is deemed fit to re-enter society and gets a job in customer relations. She has not had any contact with Sean, her partner in crime, since the incident 17 years before.
Heavy on psychology, the plot is about Charlotte trying to adjust to her newfound freedom, such as it is. A spanner is thrown in the works when Sean tries to re-establish contact. She refuses him. For her, it was a one-time thing. But it has branded her. Awake or asleep, she can think of nothing else.
The action is set in Wales and Scotland. Lloyd doesn’t look at the locals through rose-tinted glasses. They, the ones her protagonist meets at least, are rather short-tempered, rarely polite. One constable is a decent fellow, the other isn’t. Her shrink writes to her, but doesn’t give her patient her return address.
The story has no ending as such. Charlotte does her job and has her memories. She wonders how Sean is doing, yet has no intention of ever meeting him again. Life goes on.
Critics have praised One More Lie as superb, thought-provoking, well-worth reading, etc. I question whether you will enjoy perusing it in one sitting. This reviewer has read many books in one sitting, but this isn’t one of them. Charlotte is more a sympathetic than a likeable character. Then again, their childhood crime can’t be condoned.