{"id":2153,"date":"2012-08-01T06:49:35","date_gmt":"2012-08-01T06:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2153"},"modified":"2012-08-02T06:03:41","modified_gmt":"2012-08-02T06:03:41","slug":"cold-hands-by-john-j-niven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2153","title":{"rendered":"Cold Hands by John J. Niven"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by William Heinemann 2 August 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

272pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cold Hands<\/em> is John Niven\u2019s fourth novel, and represents a move away from his earlier black comedies into thriller writing, which he has marked by adding the initial \u2018J\u2019 to his name.<\/p>\n

The central character, Donnie, is living an apparently idyllic life in Canada, married to a rich wife and working half-heartedly at his writing career.\u00a0 However he is hiding from a tragic past, and the violent death of the family\u2019s pet dog is the first in a series of increasingly horrific events that churn up memories of his troubled childhood.\u00a0 The relentlessly increasing sense of a threat to his Canadian life is paralleled by the unfolding of the story of his Scottish past, with highly graphic and disturbing violence.\u00a0 The two strands come together, as might be expected, for the bloody and drawn-out climax.<\/p>\n

Niven gives us another thoroughly unlikeable protagonist.\u00a0 In Kill Your Friends<\/em> he created such a whirlwind of a character in Steven Stelfox that we were swept along at top speed, with no time to notice how much we disliked the guy.\u00a0 Cold Hands<\/em> moves at a steadier pace, and Donnie is both more realistic and less amusing than Steven.\u00a0 Even his kid is bratty, although young enough to be blameless, which at least gives us a reason for caring what happens to Donnie.<\/p>\n

The clich\u00e9d advice to writers to \u2018write what you know\u2019 can make it too easy to create characters who are writers, and Donnie is a rather lacklustre version of this standard approach.\u00a0 He is made a little more interesting, although hardly original, by his bleak book-free childhood and secret past.\u00a0 Think Clockwork Orange<\/em> meets We Need to Talk about Kevin<\/em>, but in the superficial world of the thriller.<\/p>\n

Niven is strong on voices, and Donnie, like Steven, comes to life through the first person narrative.\u00a0 He also gives us another character from the inside, slightly less successfully perhaps but it adds to the texture of the book, which would be thin without it \u2013 to say more would constitute a spoiler.<\/p>\n

For a thriller there are surprisingly few surprises \u2013 the biggest is heavily signalled, although it was unveiled a little earlier than I\u2019d expected.\u00a0 From then on there is only one question to be answered at the end (again, revealing the question would be a spoiler) and the real reason for reading on is to wallow in the gore.\u00a0 There are \u2018buckets of blud\u2019, all very graphically described.\u00a0 Niven is also a screenwriter and parts of this book are more filmic than novelistic.\u00a0 Even so the characters are stronger than the plot, which has the occasional hole (what happened to the dog\u2019s body?).<\/p>\n

Overall there is a sense that as a thriller writer he\u2019s not quite into his stride yet.\u00a0 Cold Hands<\/em> doesn\u2019t have the contemporaneous immediacy of some of his earlier writing which of course is already beginning to date badly as a result.\u00a0 Thrillers may be a better long-term bet for him as a writer, and this is a creditable, although not outstanding, start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Lesley Bown<\/p>\n

For a thriller there are surprisingly few surprises \u2013 the biggest is heavily signalled, although it was unveiled a little earlier than I\u2019d expected. From then on there is only one question to be answered at the end and the real reason for reading on is to wallow in the gore. There are \u2018buckets of blud\u2019, all very graphically described. Niven is also a screenwriter and parts of this book are more filmic than novelistic. Even so the characters are stronger than the plot, which has the occasional hole (what happened to the dog\u2019s body?).[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2153"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2158,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions\/2158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}