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ERASING MEMORY
by Scott Thornley
Random House Canada, January 2011
320 pages
$29.95 CAD
ISBN: 0307359255


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

While travelling back from his monthly visit to his dead wife's grave, police detective MacNeice, who seems not to have a first name, is called to the scene of a suspicious death in cottage country near Dundurn (read Hamilton) Ontario. He discovers the body of a young woman in evening dress, posed so that her lifeless finger interrupts the playing of an LP of Schubert's Second Piano Trio. Most affectingly for MacNeice is the presence of a bruise under the young woman's chin of a kind identical to that borne by his late wife - the two women were both violinists.

Autopsy reveals that the young woman was killed in an unusually technical kind of way, a method that shrieks Eastern Europe to MacNeice, who concludes that someone was sending a message that would be understood by those close to the victim. (Exactly why an Ontario cop should be au courant with Eastern European MOs is left unexplained.) As the investigation proceeds, MacNeice and his young colleague Fiza Aziz discover that the crime leads them deep into the murky history of Romania under Ceausescu, where, as it happens, the violinist, Lydia Petrescu, was born. Unsurprisingly, before the case is more or less successfully concluded, a fair number of bodies follow in her wake.

Nothing whets my appetite so much as the advent of a new voice on the Canadian crime fiction scene and this one arrived with some lovely blurbs. I have little quarrel with those that praise the quality of the writing, but as for the rest of the performance, I have some reservations.

The problem with the book as a whole is that it strikes one as something of a grab-bag. We begin with what we expect will be the opening act in a series of high-concept serial killings, but fairly rapidly a whole different sort of plot unfolds, one that hares off into a rather preposterous and opaque set of events anchored in the bad old days in Romania.

The main character seems to be constructed of bits and pieces from other, more established, fictional detectives, though the author claims not to be a reader of the genre. MacNeice is bereaved, still mourning a wife who died three years ago. He lives alone. He has a soundtrack, opera and jazz, which plays on his car stereo. He does not have a problem with alcohol, but does have a signature tipple - grappa, but only the best grappa. While he is not at odds with the bosses in his department, he is far from a company man and is so highly regarded that he can pick his cases. Elements in the character seem derived more from television than from print, especially MacNeice's highly developed sense of smell. He enters every scene sniffing, identifying every odour. Sadly, this peculiarity does not seem to yield any particular results when it comes to crime. Finally, in a rather strange moment, he reveals that he is of the school of Sherlock Holmes, demonstrating his powers of observation in regard to a desk blotter. Happily, he only does this sort of thing once.

His colleague, Fiza Aziz, has her own oddnesses. She is young, described as a devout Muslim (though she has a weakness for Mennonite-cured ham and downs a bit of grappa when offered). She holds a PhD in criminology, earned before she entered the police force. No explanation is offered for her unusual career path. If Thornley continues the series, she and MacNeice will certainly be an item.

The jacket bears an arresting image of the lower part of a female nude, sheltering behind a violin. It is the work of the author himself, who has won numerous awards for creative advertising and heads his own "brand management" firm. In interviews, he has maintained that his debut novel began in dreams (MacNeice does a fair amount of dreaming too) and his major challenge was to string these often powerful images into a coherent narrative. The images, especially the initial murder scene, are indeed powerful, but sadly, coherence is in rather short supply.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2011

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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