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WHAT WE REMEMBER
by Michael Thomas Ford
Kensington, June 2009
342 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0758218516


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In 1983, two days after her husband disappeared, Ada McCloud received a note through the mail saying that he was going to kill himself rather than allow his family to suffer with him through the last stages of a terminal cancer. But eight years later his body is discovered buried, along with a gun and a ring, inside a trunk, clearly not a suicide victim. For the rest of the novel we weave back and forth in time, present day disclosures in 1991 leading to scenes from the past that flesh out the revelations.

Since Dan McCloud was at the time of his murder the sheriff in a small town in upper state New York, any number of people he had arrested could have wanted him dead. But the chief suspect quickly becomes his elder son, James, whose high school class ring is the one found with the body. Certainly the teenage James resented his father, particularly his curtailing James's dates with Nancy Derry, even though she is the daughter of Dan's best friend, on the grounds that she was causing his grades to slip.

But James is not the only family member who had cause to wish the stern, authoritarian head of the household dead. In fact, it becomes clear that every single member of his household may have had a motive. The novel could as easily have been titled "Family Secrets" or even "Family Lies." Little turns out to have been the way it is initially presented. James's sister, Celeste, now seems the model of decorum. But as a teenager, her choice of a mate had been Paul Lunardi, a ne'er-do-well with a history of scrapes with the law. Dan, of course, had forbade her to see him. But James and Celeste continued to see their lovers on the sly. Did Dan catch on and confront one or the other at an explosive moment?

The younger son, Billy, was only 13 at the time of Dan's murder. However, he was already aware that he would never live up to his father's expectations, that he was somehow different from the rest of his family. Now, at the time of the murder's discovery, he is a drug addict peddling his body to secure his fixes. What brought about his slide downwards? Finally, at the time of Dan's death, his wife apparently suspected he was having an affair with a woman she had been jealous of since high school. Could their overheard fight have led to violence? Whatever, it is obvious quite early in the novel that she is keeper of many secrets.

Nor is the list of suspects confirmed to family members. One is now dead: Paul Lunardi has OD'ed. Could one of his scrapes with the sheriff have turned violent? Nancy disappeared from the town soon after the "suicide." Why? Even Celeste's husband, Nate Derry (Nancy's half-brother), is not exempt from suspicion. Now sheriff himself and thus principal investigator into the case against his own brother-in-law, he seems almost a reincarnation of his dead father-in-law, at least in his tight control over his own family. But at the time of the murder he was a deeply troubled (and troubling) teenager.

One of these seven must be the murderer. A seasoned reader of mysteries has little trouble spotting which one. Thus I was delighted at the end to discover that I had been right — and oh, so wrong! The author in his fifth novel (but first murder mystery) proves he has the skills to pull off any number of twists as he wraps up the case.

In addition to solving the mystery, as much of the pleasure of the novel comes from slowly understanding the various tensions among these characters. The depressing thing about the McCloud family is not that it is dysfunctional — for it is not — but that it is all too typical of one set of family dynamics as evidenced by their reproduction in the new Derry family. Behind the respected facade of the pillar of the community in both cases there lurks a self-centered bully who scars the family he heads.

If the novel winds up a bit too slickly after the murder is solved, it moves no faster than some of Jane Austen's sudden wrap-ups. And the pleasure the novel provides continues as the reader is left with the assembled pieces of the puzzle now to muse over and contemplate their signification at leisure. (The reader might also ponder whether the designer of the dust jacket actually read the novel and, if so, what personal symbolism he is trying to project with the image. It certainly has nothing to do with the story.)

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, June 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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