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Larimer 'Lara' Kelly is a reporter on the Ledger in an unspecified small American city. She's super-duper ambitious and has an aggressive editor with his own agenda about police incompetence on her tail. So she spots a main chance when a man turns up in the office claiming he has a video of a woman being murdered that the police refuse to take seriously. SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES in a tale of corruption which sets Lara alongside Detective Tymen 'Ty' Farraday. She doesn't trust the police, he has reason to dislike reporters, so a bumpy ride in on the cards for all concerned. It's a debut novel of promise, but equally needed a lot more work before appearing in print – it reads almost like a first draft and needs far more meat on its skinny bones. I don’t have a problem with sparely-written books – I'll read John Sandford and Ken Bruen's shopping lists – but here there's nowhere near enough setting of scene. Diving straight in is OK if you recap and expand. Ruttan doesn't, so there are a number of head-scratching moments where you can't quite work out how the story and characters are where they are. We're asked to take too much as read when it comes to police corruption, the unscrupulous editor and Ty's back story. I found it hard to accept Lara's colluding with the police given the relationship between the paper and the 14th Precinct cops. I got absolutely no feeling for the city itself. Ruttan is Canadian, and it's a shame she set the book in a fictional American city rather than use a setting closer to home. I'm not an expert on either the US legal system or American newspapers. But then I don’t know whether Ruttan is either. I don't believe the world and his wife would be allowed to sit in on the interview with a rape suspect, just because they are municipal bigwigs. And the Ledger is the weirdest newspaper I've ever encountered – there's no newsroom or news editor ever mentioned, and all we see are antagonistic maverick reporters careering round town. No paper I've ever worked on would let you pick and choose which stories you wrote, just because you didn't fancy what the subject of the story was saying. What I found most difficult to swallow, though, were Lara's ethics – or lack of them. I don't believe a reporter on a small newspaper would pay a contact for a story. And there are too many inconsistencies – one minute Lara is saying she doesn't protect sources, the next minute she is . . . Having her scraping up blood stains at crime scene would have her done for tampering with evidence almost anywhere in the world. And the final straw for me was her breathtakingly unethical behaviour over a phonecall late on in the book. Too many short scenes make it difficult for there ever to be much in the way of tension. There's a spark there between Lara and Ty, and between Lara and Jimmy the photographer, but none of the other characters made much impression on me. Ruttan writes brisk, clean prose and the municipal corruption angle is a good one. But in many ways SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES feels like an unfleshed-out movie outline. There's a good book and an intriguing story struggling to get out of this, but the book needed a damn good edit to fulfil the promise it shows. Ruttan's approach is too scattergun, like a fast-moving film script. By the end there is too much cross-cutting, too many points of view and not enough tension, even when the bodies are piling up.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, January 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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