Library Limelights 248

Sharon Bolton. Lost. 2013. USA: Minotaur Books, 2014. 

Original UK title: Like This, For Ever. I’m used to Bolton’s great stand-alone crime novels, not realizing this is book number four in a series about detective Lacey Flint. We learn that Lacey had just been through a horrifying experience on a Cambridge case in book three; now on a leave of absence she’s seeing a counsellor, although the nature and fallout of that experience is deliberately mysterious. London is on nerve edge due to the abduction and killing of young boys, the investigation being headed by DI Dana Tulloch. Now there’s a familiar name: she appeared in Bolton’s Sacrifice (LL227). Clearly, Dana and Lacey have a history of distrust unknown to the reader. The killer has left no evident clues; the victims’ bodies have been drained of blood. Blood is a central theme, even among some of the living.

Lacey befriends Barney, boy next door, who seems like a potential target because of his age and his father’s casual neglect. Only to Lacey does Barney confide that he has blackout periods of lost time. Avidly following the crime news, he and his gang of pre-teen boys decide to visit the crime scenes for clues. They believe in safety in numbers after dark if they all stay together. Privately Barney worries about his father who is not where he says he is on certain nights. Lacey delves reluctantly into her own instincts about the killer, to Dana’s annoyance; she almost becomes a victim herself. Among Bolton’s many gifts is the ability to weave strong sensory images into each scene. Her attention to detail in police methodology, tensions between characters, and the thoughts of an obsessive-compulsive eleven-year-old is exceptional. To their horror, DI Mark Joesbury’s son Huck – Dana’s godson – has been seized and Barney, too, disappears.

But I found some – to me – anomalies. Is it possible for numbers of people to sneak across houseboat after houseboat on the Thames without their weight or movements alerting the occupants? It’s extremely important for Lacey to have regular contact with an unnamed woman convict, another mystery with no explanation. Lacey’s relationship with DI Joesbury obviously predates this book; her strangely ambivalent interactions with him make no sense. And overall, let’s face it, blood is a creepy topic. I’m not so sure about more Lacey and company, but I haven’t read all of Bolton’s stand-alones yet.

One-liners

▪ “Try Googling ‘obsession with blood’ and you’ll be awash with evidence of people who crave the smell and taste of blood.” (104)

▪ She’d wanted to know nothing about this investigation and here it was, churning around in her head as if she’d been right in amongst it from the start. (137)

▪ To get to his granddad’s boat in the third row, the children would have to creep across the ones in between. (148)

▪ “What you went through in Cambridge earlier this year would have been difficult for anyone to deal with.” (176)

▪ “I think he found out about his mum, wiped it from his head and now his brain is playing odd tricks with him.” (248)

Multi-liners

▪ “And he’s speeding up. He’s taking them faster and he’s killing them faster.” (19)

▪ He could find any number of things that were lost. Why couldn’t he find his mum? (38)

▪ “That woman is damaged goods. And she will never be part of a team.” (177)

▪ “This is a bloody minefield. You have to talk to his dad.” (248)

▪ “Lacey, please sort yourself out,” he told her. She braced herself for the slam of the door, but it closed softly and sadly and he was gone. (250)

▪ All she wanted to do was find Joesbury and help him look for his son. Yet Barney, with no mother and a father in police custody, had no one to look out for him. (317)

Communications

Lacey folded the paper on her lap. The team hadn’t a clue. Pursuing a number of lines of inquiry was as good as saying they had no idea where to turn next. She pulled out her iPhone and pressed the Twitter app. During the day, some wag had christened the murderer the Twilight Killer and #TwilightKiller had been attracting new posts at the rate of several a second. As was the Missing Boys Facebook page. Lacey had also followed comment streams on MySpace and Mumsnet. Several wanted to know of any shops that hadn’t sold out of garlic. There were rumours of holy water and crucifixes being stolen from churches and Bram Stoker’s Dracula was predicted to hit the bestseller chart for the first time since its publication. It seemed safe to say hysteria was building. (136-7)

On the river

Sensing Barney wasn’t ready to leave just yet, Lacey sat down in the cockpit facing the Creek. Barney mirrored her, keeping his back to the water. The tide was high and the boat rocked gently, soothingly, against its moorings. When it was out, the whole of the Theatre Arm would smell of mud. The boat would be grounded, skewed at an angle. No mains water, relying on a generator for electricity, calor gas to cook. And that rubbish-strewn yard to negotiate several times a day. It would be the most impractical place in London to live. (388)

Kevin Barry. Night Boat to Tangier. Ebook download from TPL. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2019.

Here’s a refreshing style, one that totally suits the dialogue of the main characters – dialogue of incomplete sentences and no quotation marks, but perfect rhythm. Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond are old men whiling away the hours in the Spanish port terminal of Algeciras, waiting/hoping to find Maurice’s daughter Dilly. The two men have shared a lifetime of experiences, including Maurice’s wife and mutual stints in a psychiatric facility they call the Bughouse. Full of Irish vernacular, they are much at ease with each other these days. That was not always the case during their dangerous years of smuggling drugs to Ireland from North Africa via Spain. They prefer the term merchant traders, romanticizing generations of similarly-employed ancestors.

It’s not all banter. Each man has had many dark days-weeks-years: drinking, hard drugs, hiding out from authorities or fellow criminals, haunted by ancient ghosts of their native land. Little more than thugs, back and forth their stories come out. Dilly is adored by both; her story is partially told. Night Boat is raw and tender, often funny. Is it a mystery novel? It is a crimenovel ... longlisted for the Booker Prize. You feel its prose on a visceral level. Maurice’s summary of his grown daughter: 

“A girl of infinite possibility! And you turn around and she’s out the gap and gone to fucken Spain and hanging off hairy bastards and selling tat at the side of the road like a fucken leper.” (55)

Dialogue

▪ My arse isn’t right since the octopus we ate in Málaga. (23)

▪ The woman like a pump the way she suck money out of you. (80)

▪ You’re getting an anxiety colour on you. The yellowy colour. (84)

▪ The bones is so bad now, the old man said, it’s a class of horse ointment I’m smearin’ into meself. (124)

▪ The fact is we’re in our prime. You and me? We’re three o’clock of a summer’s afternoon. (143)

▪ Charlie Redmond throws a mean squint at the sky. It has plenty to say for itself. (326)

In general

▪ An attack dog barks a yard of stars. (24)

▪ Their talk is a shield against feeling. (26)

▪ They talk about being here, once again, on the coast of Barbary, as though on a magnet’s drag. (91)

▪ Frickin’ Ireland. Its smiling fiends. Its speaking rocks. Its haunted fields. Its sea memory. Its wildness and strife. Its haunt of melancholy. The way that it closes in. (132)

Dilly

▪ Three years she’s been gone, Maurice says, there’s me, her old dad, with the heart hangin’ sideways out of me chest. (74)

▪ She wanted to travel to the far recesses of herself and see what she might find back there. (224)

▪ They look right through her again and she realises now that they cannot see her. ... They are looking for some ghost called Dilly. (238)

▪ Dilly, what you need to know? Is that you can’t be around them. You need to go away and not come back. (312)

▪ I have a mild case of dreadlocks, Dilly said. I don’t have Rastafarian beliefs. And actually I’m not that into Bob. (291)

Jane Harper. The Survivors. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Flatiron Books, 2020.

Small seaside resort town in Tasmania. Young adults who’ve known each other since school days. And their parents, siblings. The cast of characters builds up until one needs to compile a chart of the families involved. It’s the tail end of the tourist season; Kieran and Mia Elliott return to Evelyn Bay to help his parents, Verity and Brian, with preparations for moving house. Kieran reunites with his buddies Ash McDonald and Sean Gilroy. Bronte is an off-island student, working a summer waitressing job. Bronte’s drowned body is found on the beach – definitely foul play. Everyone in the community has an opinion on what happened, but no motive. Some not-so-covert conversations name her co-worker Liam as the chief suspect although unspoken thoughts dwell on Kieran’s father. Sole local cop Chris Renn brings in Hobart detectives. Many residents are recalling a similar tragedy twelve years earlier during The Big Storm, when young Gabrielle Birch was last seen on that same beach. Kieran’s and Sean’s older brothers, Finn and Toby, died in the same Storm when their dive boat overturned.

So where are we going with a wander between current events and childhood memories, meeting so many people? Into the past, of course, and a great deal of tangled relationships. Families are the overriding subject: their bonds, their mistakes, their grief, and their resolutions. Guilt weighs some of them down; blaming and accusations are unsatisfactory alternatives. Harper has changed her previous settings from Australia’s dry and dusty desert to a water-soaked atmosphere where iron statues, a tribute to shipwreck survivors, oversee the wild ocean as the tide ebbs and flows. It’s quite a remarkable job handling all the diverse emotions. With so many characters involved, I highly recommend pencilling a chart!

Samples

▪ “But the way I see it—you kill someone, you deserve all the shit that’s coming your way.” (37)

▪ Verity Elliott did not want a new start. What she wanted was for things to be the way they used to be. (75)

▪ Kieran knew all about the tunnels so twisty you could get lost ten steps deep. All he could think about was Finn’s warning: If you’re still in here at high tide, mate, you’re not coming out. (138)

▪ “I mean, Gabby was my friend, but she could also be”—Mia hesitated this time―”a bit difficult.” (264)

▪ “Yeah, okay, but I’m just asking why you’re wasting all that time talking to us, when we all know whoever did this has been back on the mainland for days.” (377)

▪ “I think the person responsible is probably in this room. I think it’s one of you.” (385)

▪ What were Finn and Toby doing out on their boat in the middle of the storm? (477)

▪ “No, Kieran. We’re not going to do this. This is not the kind of thing you want to keep to yourself.” (501)

▪ “Finn died because of you. It was your fault.” (509)

▪ He rocked her gently as the thought that had been bothering him—the fluid, flowing pull at the edge of his consciousness―grew solid and took shape. (535)