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John Harvey, winner of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for his contributions to the genre, has published over one hundred books, ranging from westerns to poetry to short stories to books for young readers to screen plays to notable crime fiction, including the Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder series. In FAR CRY, he brings back Cambridge detectives Will Grayson and Helen Walker from GONE TO GROUND (2008) to work on a missing persons case. Ruth Lawson has patched together her life after enduring the loss of her daughter, who disappeared in a thick and sudden Cornwall fog and was ultimately found dead in an abandoned engine room on the cliffs. Though searchers had missed the body when they canvassed the area earlier and the lead detective remained suspicious, the death was ruled accidental. Helen has remarried, had another daughter, Beatrice, and is able, just barely, to cling to the semblance of a normal life, though she secretly speaks to her lost daughter when nobody else is in the house. But her frail grip is loosened when Beatrice, too, disappears, at just about the same age as her first daughter. Will has his eye on a repeat sex offender who he's certain has been at it again, but he and Helen also retrace the steps taken in the first investigation to see if something was missed. The complexity of the case, as the police try to keep all avenues open without losing a crumb of a clue, substitutes subtlety for a hard-driving, linear and action-heavy narrative. That said, there's no lack of suspense in the emotional unfolding of the past and the ways the families, the suspects, and the police respond to the two disappearances. Harvey takes his time developing the nuances of the story, doubling back to the past, spinning out various possibilities. At 500 pages, the style of Far Cry doesn't demonstrate the laconic restraint of his Resnick series, but it's nonetheless satisfying, the complex interaction of a richly realized set of characters whose paths refuse to take the shortest route between two points but rather cross and double back to weave an absorbing and deeply human story. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, June 2010
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