|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Rebecca Carter is driving her van on a snowy night just north of Denver, Colorado. Her young daughter, called Moonflower but christened Monica, is half asleep but awake enough to wage a little quarrel with her mother. Distracted, Rebecca only narrowly misses hitting an elk wandering on the road and drives into a snowdrift on the shoulder. The whole incident is witnessed by another driver who offers to help. Rebecca abruptly rejects him and manages to get back on the road. The entire episode seems entirely minor except for Rebecca's anxiety about being remembered by the observer.
This vignette is followed by a new chapter introducing another major character, FBI Special Agent Marc Donner, who has recently landed at the Denver airport on his way to examine the newly discovered corpse of a man whose throat has been cut and his spine severed. Donner wants to find out if this one is an addition to his lengthening list of similar unsolved murders, all of them men who were child-abusers. He thinks there is a serial killer at work, but as seems to be the case in real life as well as crime fiction, few of his superiors are willing to accept the hypothesis. Donner is a man who believes his mission on earth is to round up as many child-abusers as he can and bring them to justice. He has no sympathy for them and little for those of his fellow officers who think that they got what they deserved and it is no great deal if whoever killed them gets away with it.
We do not know at this point whether Rebecca is a killer on the hunt for serial abusers or whether the author will want us to sympathize with her or with Donner in his quest for justice. The answer to that will require one to read right through to the end, and even then may be elusive. For that reason I can say little more about the workings of the plot, primarily because if I do, I am likely to give something away that will deprive you of the genuine shock that I experienced a little more than half-way through the story, a response that was unusually startling especially for a hardened reader of crime fiction.
What I can say about BLOOD LIKE MINE is that it is superbly written, as we have come to expect from Stuart Neville. This is, as far as I am aware, his first to be set exclusively outside of his native Northern Ireland, but he makes no effort to fake a familiarity with a foreign landscape that he may not have. He is offering not a travelogue but a wrenching moral challenge.
As the book jacket points out, this is a book that melds crime fiction with horror conventions, but there is nothing exploitive about Neville's approach. It does generate great suspense but also goes beyond simply heightening tension so that readers' sympathies are engaged while our moral sensibilities are also addressed. Something other-worldly has always flickered within Neville's fiction as just a list of his titles will suggest. It is satisfying to see that he has at last found a way to introduce that dark side in a manner that is both terrifying and satisfactory.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2024
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
