WHILE AWAY SUMMER IN THRALL OF MYSTERY
This diverse trio of novels will keep readers guessing
Canada’s Linwood Barclay has moved from strength to strength since he first made the international bestseller lists in 2007 and established himself as a thriller writer of genuine originality.
Now he stands a good chance of dominating the summer mystery sweepstakes with an exciting new novel that delivers its final wallop on the very last page.
Broken Promise is a 484-page thrill ride that explores a recurring Barclay theme — ordinary lives thrown into extremely nasty situations. It also marks the first instalment of a projected trilogy of novels — a new venture that he admitted last year was something of a gamble.
So yes, its unsettling climax does leave you anxiously wondering what will happen next. However, and this is important, Broken Promise definitely works as a powerful standalone thriller.
It features one of Barclay’s vulnerable “Everyman” heroes — in this case David Harwood, a jobless journalist and single father who has returned to his childhood home of Promise Falls, N.Y., to pick up the pieces of his life. Instead he finds himself facing new crises — beginning with the 10-month-old infant child his emotionally troubled cousin, Maria, claims to be the gift of an angel who left it on her front porch.
When the baby’s actual mother is murdered, David is driven to seek the truth of what happened. This envelops him in a widening nightmare involving the unearthing of family secrets, the possibility of a serial killer stalking the town and weird local events that include the ritual slaughter of animals.
Promise Falls is a favourite fictional milieu for Barclay, who also used it as his setting in Never Look Away and Trust Your Eyes, and again he is terrific at evoking the texture of small- town life. Furthermore, although Barclay’s credentials as a top-notch suspense novelist are now firmly established, his previous skills as a humorous columnist for the Toronto Star have not deserted him. Broken Promise brings back some entertaining characters from past books — among them the doughnut-addicted police detective, Barry Duckworth, and the town’s scumbag ex-mayor, Randall Finley.
Meanwhile, the benign side of the mystery genre is represented by the The Novel Habits Of Happiness. This is the prolific Alexander McCall Smith’s latest report on the doings of Edinburgh philosopher and amateur sleuth Isabel Dalhousie. Smith is in a quietly celebratory mood when it comes to the city of Edinburgh and the dramatic Argyll coast — which becomes the focal point of Isabel’s attempt to solve the mystery of a young child who has uncannily accurate memories of a house he could never have lived in and a place he could never have visited.
This is another example of Smith blithely stretching the dimensions of the mystery genre to impudent lengths. And because she is an ethical philosopher, her very method of dealing with her findings does not lead to a conventionally neat conclusion.
Along the way, we are predictably treated to various engaging digressions reflective of this author’s magpie mind. Who else would feel the inclination to chat with us about a forgotten historical personage named Hugh the Dull?
Britain’s Tony Parsons evokes his own alarming sense of place in his vivid new thriller, The Slaughter Man. A particularly gritty and bloody London remains his milieu. And if anything it’s more disturbing than it was in last year’s The Murder Bag, the novel that marked Parsons’ successful move from mainstream novels into crime fiction.
His central protagonist, London cop Max Wolfe, is also a single parent, and his loving and entirely believable relationship with his lively daughter, Scout, offers welcome respite from the mayhem that permeates this book.
The Slaughter Man begins with a gory New Year’s Eve murder. The victims are a pair of celebrity parents with Olympic backgrounds, a teenage boy and his sister. The weapon is a cattle gun, similar to the one used with such grisly purpose in the Coen brothers film No Country For Old Men.
One child, a four-year-old boy, is missing. And a nationwide search for the youngster proves futile. As for the actual killer — well, there is Peter Hawkins, who used a similar weapon years before in another notorious murder, but this potential lead simply produces more entanglements. Indeed, what initially seemed like an investigation into a grisly family murder explodes into something far more appalling — involving the vice trade at its most vicious.