There's no place like home--fortunately
By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe October 28
Down River
By John Hart
St. Martin’s, 325 pp., $24.95
Little Face
By Sophie Hannah
Soho, 310 pp., $25
Missing Witness
By Gordon Campbell
Morrow, 448 pp., $24.95
Each of this month's crop of crime-fiction novels explores the family ties that both bind and blind us.
John Hart's "Down River" opens with Adam Chase en route to North Carolina, driving toward a home to which he vowed he'd never return and a father to whom he hasn't spoken in five years. The river and the familiar landscape trigger feelings he thought he'd long ago put to rest: "The land was scarred with emotion. Love and loss and a quiet, corrosive anguish."
e was exiled to New York after being acquitted of the murder of a schoolmate. Old wounds reopen, and Adam's rage over unfinished business boils to the surface when he's forced to confront his traumatic grief over his mother's suicide, and his father's role in that death more than a decade earlier.
Precisely why Adam has returned is slowly revealed. The elements of the mystery plot - lives are threatened, people are beaten and murdered apparently as a consequence of escalating land values and Adam's father's stubborn refusal to sell his vast acreage - are overshadowed by the inner turmoil of characters who uncover secrets from the past.
This is a novel about the power of family, how it defines and follows us, no matter how far or fast we run. As in his Edgar-nominated debut, "The King of Lies," Hart takes his time, snaring the reader with evocative storytelling and lush prose along with the usual quota of conflict and murder.
The family from hell takes center stage in British author Sophie Hannah's quirky, dark psychological-suspense novel "Little Face." Alice Fancourt lives with her husband, the nasty but fragile David, and her controlling Snow Queen mother-in-law, Vivienne. The palatial family estate, the Elms, is more prison than home.
Two weeks after her baby, Florence, is born, Alice goes on a brief outing and returns, checks on her daughter, and begins to scream ("A loud roar, like a siren is coming from my mouth. I don't think I could stop, even if I wanted to"). Alice insists that the baby in the cot is not Florence. Someone has stolen her child.
Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse, an odd loner, interviews Alice. Despite her preposterous premise - that her baby has been replaced - he believes her. But his colleagues won't take Alice's story seriously until, a week later, both Alice and the baby she claims isn't hers disappear. Simon begins to connect the dots and looks into the murder of David's first wife, Laura, who was stabbed to death outside the Elms, supposedly by an intruder.
The novel has a unique structure. Alice's story is told in the first person, beginning with her returning home and declaring Florence missing, and continuing up until she and the baby disappear. Interwoven are chapters recounted in the third person and written from the point of view of the detective and his female partner, beginning a week later, after Alice goes missing.
As in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," in which Agatha Christie gleefully trampled on that sacrosanct rule of the mystery novel to "play fair with the reader," the power this novel packs derives from narrators who play fast and loose with what they know. Many traditional mystery readers will find this off-putting in the extreme. Still, the solution is a stunner.
Gordon Campbell's debut novel, "Missing Witness," a courtroom drama set in 1973 Phoenix, is in the great tradition of Perry Mason with flourishes of Michael Connelly's "The Lincoln Lawyer." It tells of the stunningly beautiful Rita Eddington and her troubled 12-year-old daughter, Miranda. The pair enter a squalid fieldworker's shack to talk to Travis Eddington, Rita's estranged husband and Miranda's father. Angry words are exchanged, and six shots are fired. Rita and Miranda emerge, and Rita drops the gun. One of them killed Travis.
Rita is charged with Travis's murder. Young Miranda, detained as well, falls into a catatonic stupor. Oddly, it's Travis's wealthy father who hires Dan Morgan, the best criminal defense attorney in the country, to defend his daughter-in-law.
The hero of the novel is Doug McKenzie, Dan's young apprentice, fresh out of law school and eager to learn the secrets of criminal defense from the legendary litigator. Dan mentors Doug, sharing his strategy for making pompous adversary DA Maximilian Hauser look like a fool. But Doug also learns the truth of a colleague's assertion about Dan: "Occasionally he'll treat you like a mushroom. . . . He keeps you in the dark and feeds you" excrement. And he discovers, firsthand, the fine line between being tutored and being manipulated by a master puppeteer for whom winning is the ultimate goal.
The courtroom drama in this novel is riveting and the characterization rich. The story is a fascinating exploration of the hubris of attorneys who strut into the courtroom to do battle, and a thoughtful dissection of the minefield of criminal defense.
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