Maybe I’m reading too many books? I found this novel baffling for quite a time; what exactly is the mystery that needs solving? It might be why Melisandre Dawes left her baby daughter Isadora to suffocate in a hot car ten years ago. Or it might be why she’s returned from self-exile hoping to pick up where she left off with her other, now-teenaged, daughters. Or why Melisandre hired filmmaker Harmony Burns to explore/justify the criminal insanity plea that exempted her from any prison time, and to document her reunion with her girls, Alanna and Ruby. Melisandre’s old friend Tyner Gray is her lawyer; Tess Monaghan is a P.I. who often works for him. In this case, Tess and partner Sandy are really employed by Melisandre—finding and interviewing people past and present for the documentary. Tess also features in a substantial series from the author, although this is my first taste.
While filmed interviews are going on, Tess slowly uncovers conflicting bits of evidence related to Melisandre’s trial. Melisandre is not a very likeable character—wealthy in her own right, entitled, my-way-or-the-highway; she assumes her daughters will be overjoyed to see her again. But Alanna and Ruby have mixed feelings about that even though initially their sole-custodian father Stephen had agreed to their meeting. Over the years Stephen managed his household with nanny Elyse and later, his second wife Felicia. Then Stephen dies, not a natural death. Was someone bedevilled enough by sordid old secrets to kill him? Deliberate or accident? Tess is not the only one learning that the children were lied to, manipulated. It helps to understand how film editing works with videos and transcripts and third-party services, plus the various means of transmitting or saving the material, in order to appreciate the convoluted Dawes web. Tess’s own lively domestic life is more fun.
One-liners
▪ “No, she’s just a very rich lady who has decided that her life’s mission is to educate people about criminal insanity by thrusting herself back into public view after a decade abroad.” (37)
▪ Nothing wrong with flirting, especially if one’s husband was going to spend date night with his ex-wife. (143)
▪ “She’s not going to save herself at her daughter’s expense.” (203)
▪ “There’s one more thing I should probably tell you.” (213)
▪ “Does your fiancé know how you’re paying for your wedding?” (251)
▪ “I hope she can afford to pay the fine for breaching confidentiality.” (292)
Multi-liners
▪ Her new partner held people in even lower esteem than Tess did. It was a valuable quality in a private investigator, occasionally enervating in one’s only co-worker. (13)
▪ Money was like skin. She had been born with it, she was used to it. Money offered her some protection, some comfort, and she couldn’t live without it. But it didn’t make her invulnerable. (77)
▪ She should have come back sooner, but she hadn’t been strong enough to face Alanna and Ruby. She was so ashamed of what she had done. (77-8)
▪ “Her film can milk it either way, right? Heartfelt reunion or isolated by the evil ex.” (97)
▪ Had Alanna felt that way at age five? Yes, yes, at age five she had begun to find everything about people’s bodies to be silly at best, vile at worst. (120)
▪ Why did death stalk her? What did it want from her? (155)
▪ Alanna had been transparent, as see-through as a jellyfish. Ruby was the complicated one, even at age three. (253)
Doting father:
“We’ll talk, okay?”
But that was one thing Alanna and her father never did. Oh, they used words, made sentences. Put them together like little rafts to sail across the surface of things, just like the boats her mother had taught Alanna and Ruby to sail down the gutters. But they never really talked. Because he knew and she knew it was Alanna’s fault that her mother had gone crazy and killed Isadora. (59-60)
Tess stress:
Circumstances had thrown her into her PI gig, and she was good at it, even if the local newspaper, the Beacon-Light, had hung that stupid moniker, the Accidental Detective, on her. Crow had said that article was practically a blueprint for stalking.
Then she became an accidental mom. Soon, Tess supposed, she would be an accidental spouse, assuming she and Crow ever found time to get the license, go to the courthouse. But there was never time. (85)
Harmony balks:
“It’s not what I signed on for. I don’t do crowd scenes, headline drama, CNN crazy-lady-of-the-week. I wanted to make a film about a woman who is trying to rebuild her relationship with her daughters.”
“I thought it was a broad look at the criminal insanity plea.”
“Yes, it’s that, too. But I also wanted to document the return to something that others would call normalcy. Insanity by any name—there’s still such a taint.” (162)
Will Ferguson. The Finder. Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2020.
Will Ferguson is one of those Canadian treasures whom I hope is not under-appreciated. What is his latest novel about, anyway? One could say it’s an archaeological / cultural mystery. Or a travelogue—Okinawa, Belfast, Christchurch, Uluru, Loch Lomond. Or a love story. Gaddy Rhodes is an Interpol agent intent on catching a misty unknown figure who steals precious forgotten artifacts and sells them for millions. Tom Rafferty writes banal travel brochures, flailing in a downward spiral since his one successful book, chasing his own tail. Memorable characters jostle the pages: Inspector Shimada, the lonely land’s end sentinel; Colonel McNair, secret family avenger; Tamsin the tough photojournalist in war zones; schoolgirl Catherine, the soul of kindness. Rafferty’s ex-wife Rebecca is purposely less defined; more important to Rafferty is recovering a letter he sent her. Written when drunk, he has no idea what he said but is convinced it was his best writing ever.
Gaddy’s failure to catch the mysterious thief (a “small man” is all anyone with a glimpse can recall of him) gets her demoted to a desk job. Ferguson is always fun, but there’s way more depth to this one. Myths and morals mix rather splendidly in the Finder’s chosen thefts although his own identity remains obscure. Catherine calls him “the king of forgotten things.” When are some things best forgotten and left buried? Rafferty struggles to retrieve his true nature; only Tamsin is liberated. I felt transported to windswept islands, into a real-life earthquake, to the vibrant desert of the Outback. Bravo, Will Ferguson!
Word: aleatory – random, by chance
One-liners
▪ Every year, drunken husbands drowned in bathtubs across Japan, often suspiciously so. (30)
▪ My mother died, as they do, and I drifted to Southeast Asia, as you might. (53)
▪ A nimbus of power surrounded the colonel; it was like his own personal brand of cologne. (100)
▪ Gaddy knew full well that she had been relegated to the fringe ranks of conspiratorial nuts and free-range cranks, to a minor post, aggressively ignored, but with this came a certain amount of freedom: the freedom of diminished expectations. (116)
▪ They’d barely noticed him on the flight down; he’d been silent, almost catatonic: a middle-aged slab of a man, frayed at the edges, skin creased in a palimpsest of sunburns past, face like poorly thrown pottery. (126)
▪ Tamsin slung her camera, with telephoto lens still attached, onto the table the way a soldier might hoist a gun, finished her brandy with a flourish. (169)
▪ Two days on the train and they’d only moved a few inches on the map. (268)
Multi-liners
▪ The souls of these dead were a long time departing; it took thirty-three years to cross over. Rites and rituals helped them along their journey. (23)
▪ That’s who I was up against. A pale crusader who would not let me rest. A heart like Hiroshima. (57)
▪ “You certainly played Billy Moore for a fool, didn’t you? Harpooned him well and true.” (107)
▪ “Always a pleasant surprise,” he said, “when the stars align like that. Usually, when I’m scrambling to get out, you’re rushing to get in.” (177)
▪ The agreement was that the least drunk of the two of them would put the other one to bed. More and more, that was Raff. (248)
▪ “Don’t wake him up, please don’t, please. He doesn’t know you were ever in our barn.” (257)
▪ He nodded. “I can taste colors, too. I can hear numbers. And I can see certain scents.” (342-3)
Through the festive market:
The sound of the festival grew louder, and pork knuckles were simmering in hot pots. Pig ears with vinegar and sliced cucumber. Vendors calling out. Purple sweet potatoes, roasted hot, served split and steaming. Fermented tofu steeped in awamori liquor, as thickly rendered as cheese. Paper lanterns that bobbed and bowed on the night wind. (79)
Boss disapproval:
“You’re shoehorning evidence, Gaddy. You’re forcing the pieces to fit, looking for patterns that aren’t there. Evidence should suggest a theory. Not the other way around. You can’t concoct an outlandish scenario and then go looking for evidence to support it. We don’t even know this other man’s name, or whether he even exists.” (98)
Karin Slaughter. The Silent Wife. USA: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020.
State investigators Will Trent and partner Faith Mitchell work on a brutal rape and killing that reverberates back to similar crimes eight years ago in Grant County, when the late police chief Jeffery Tolliver was in charge. At the time, he had insufficient evidence to charge the likely suspect but the man was imprisoned on other serious crimes. A common denominator present at both time periods is medical examiner Sara Linton, then Jeffery’s ex-wife and now Will’s lover. Not only is a killer still active, many other female victims are discovered, showing the man’s violent progression from rape to murder; some of the earliest victims are alive but can’t or won’t talk about what they endured. The past informs the present, but it’s a job to keep track of which women died on whose watch (Jeffery’s or Will’s) with so many women’s names and cases on shifting narratives. Astute readers will figure out the perp but the real suspense is whether he’ll be caught.
Author Slaughter is known and highly admired for the complexity and realism of her thrillers. Police procedure, and its occasional flaws, receive their fair share of the story; collegial issues and characters are always well done. Added to that is the fraught but tender relationship between Sara and her man. However. The descriptions of physical trauma are gruesome, scary, and medically intense. In her Acknowledgements, Slaughter says we need to know these things about what predators do. Beyond the on-site body horrors and then the lengthy autopsies Sara performs, Slaughter waxes far too long and detailed on such subjects as the embalming process and the use of menstrual products. More than I could stomach. I’ve been a fan but with the last couple of books I could see the shock element ramping up. Thanks, but I’ll take a break.
Will
▪ “Ninety per cent of all arguments I’ve ever had with Sara have been about me not telling her things.” (94)
▪ The drive back to headquarters had been excruciating for both of them, Faith because she was trying not to cry, and Will because seeing Faith trying so hard not to cry had made him want to break things. (689)
Sara
▪ It was hard to move forward when you kept looking back over your shoulder. (473)
▪ She counted at least thirty embalmers leaning over thirty bodies. Most of the workers were women and all of them were white. The funeral business was notoriously segregated. (487)
Faith
▪ She had never seen Nick explode like that. She never wanted to see it again. (72)
▪ “All we’ve got right now is a whole bunch of what-the-fuck?” (94)
Jeffery
▪ He should have realized that, by cheating on Sara, he was also blowing up his relationship with the entire county. (110)
▪ When cops talked about choir practice, they meant the kind that took place in a bar, not a church. (575)
▪ Lena nodded once. She understood that he was counting on her to lie. (675)
Others
▪ “So,” Amanda summarized, “taking out Grant County, we have eight different women of different ages who were working in different fields, looked nothing alike, and were all found dead showing no discernible cause of death, located in different areas of a state where thousands of missing women cases remain open, in a country where roughly 300,000 women and girls are reported missing every single year.” (88)
▪ And then he patted Will on the shoulder, because apparently, all the men from small Southern towns patted each other like dogs. (209)
▪ “Come on, dude. Grow some balls. Sara’s using Nesbitt to yank your chain.” (229)
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