{"id":4482,"date":"2013-09-12T11:21:43","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T11:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4482"},"modified":"2013-09-18T11:09:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-18T11:09:18","slug":"september-crime-round-up-by-n-j-cooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=4482","title":{"rendered":"September Crime Round-up by N. J. Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Cry by Helen FitzGerald published by Faber<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Cruellest Game by Hilary Bonner Published by Pan<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Twins by Saskia Sarginson Published by Piatkus<\/strong><\/p>\n

If You Were Here by Alafair Burke Published by Faber (UK), Harper<\/strong> (US)<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After years of reading about male sleuths, who protect themselves from their own vulnerabilities with alcohol and violence, I am encouraged to see publishers bringing out and promoting crime fiction that explores female experience.\u00a0 One topic recurs more than any other:\u00a0 a woman dealing with the death or disappearance of a child.\u00a0 Although many covers include the phrase ‘every mother’s nightmare’, I think this particular thread is more tightly woven into the human condition than that and may have something to do with our common sense of self, perhaps mourning our lost childhood or wondering about the adult we might have become if we had taken different turnings on the way from then until now.<\/p>\n

Helen FitzGerald’s fourth novel, The Cry<\/em>, sees her heroine battling with the familiar frustration of a baby who won’t stop screaming.\u00a0 To add to her distress, they are on a 21-hour flight fromScotland to Australia, which forces her to face the other passengers’ loathing of her inadequate mothering skills.\u00a0 At the airport Joanna was forced by a security officer to pour her own medicine and the Calpol she is carrying to soothe Noah from their own bottles into others small enough to comply with the anti-terrorism regulations.\u00a0 Much later, when they are driving away from Melbourne airport, her husband realises that Noah is dead.\u00a0 Assuming that she must have muddled the bottles when she intended to dose Noah with Calpol and in fact given him her own medicine, Alistair tells her they must pretend Noah was stolen from the back of the parked car while they were distracted.\u00a0 He will protect her and she will know nothing of where or how Alistair disposes of their son’s body.\u00a0 Maternal guilt, at first sparked in a small but powerful way by her inability to stop Noah disturbing everyone on the aeroplane, takes on a new and anguishing intensity with the knowledge that she must have killed him.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The novel is told in the third person from Joanna’s point of view and in the first by her predecessor as Alistair’s wife, Alexandra.\u00a0 FitzGerald moves backwards and forwards in time, making it clear during the narrative that Joanna stands trial for murder but withholding the details.\u00a0 She tightens the readers’ nerves inch by inch as she takes us through the weeks after Noah’s ‘disappearance’.\u00a0 There are plenty of twists to keep us guessing, while the emotional intensity of the novel is increased by the directness and conversational informality of the style.\u00a0 FitzGerald picks just the right small physical details to skewer each agonizing moment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The child at the centre of Hilary Bonner’s The Cruellest Game<\/em> is already into girls and exam stress when his mother finds him hanging from the beams in his bedroom.\u00a0 Convinced that he could not have killed himself, she searches for evidence to persuade the police and then for reasons to explain why anyone else would have wanted to kill him.\u00a0 She has been his prime carer throughout his life because her husband works on the rigs off Aberdeen and can rarely get home.\u00a0 As she discovers aspects of her son’s life that she never suspected, she is also forced to understand a lot about her self and her husband.\u00a0 While the emotional intensity is not as powerful as FitzGerald’s, the narrative zips along.<\/p>\n

Saskia Sarginson’s first novel, The Twins<\/em>, takes a quite different look at a child’s disappearance and likely death.\u00a0 Set between 1972 and 1987, it tells the story of Isolte and Viola, twin daughters of a hippy-ish single mother, from their point of view.\u00a0 Having escaped from a scruffy, smelly commune in Wales, the three are now living in an unsanitary cottage in Suffolk.\u00a0 The girls often truant from school and are clearly difficult in many ways.\u00a0 Their mother makes \"\"<\/a>rag dolls to sell, talks about the importance of freedom, and ekes out her small resources by foraging for as much free food as she can find.\u00a0 The girls fall in with twin boys from a violent family and get into all kinds of trouble.\u00a0 When their mother starts going out with a stolid widower with a daughter of his own, Issy and Viola are furious.\u00a0 Their treatment of his daughter, a sensitive, scared, musical goody-goody, is clearly going to lead to trouble.\u00a0 What happens to her and the consequences for everyone else hang over the narrative.\u00a0 This is not a whodunnit<\/em> but a whatdidtheydo<\/em>, and a most engrossing one.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Alafair Burke, a professor at Hofstra Law School, describes If You Were Here<\/em> as, ‘probably the most personal book I’ve written’.\u00a0 She was once a deputy district attorney and is now married to a graduate of West Point.\u00a0 Her fictional counterpart is McKenna Jordan, who has made a new career as a journalist after a disastrous ending to her career in the DA’s office.\u00a0 During her research for an article she becomes convinced that the victim of a street mugging recorded on CCTV is a long-lost friend, who has been assumed dead for many years.\u00a0 Once again, the narrative moves between the past and present, pulling the reader on through the mysteries that have affected the family and friends of the young woman who vanished without leaving any physical evidence of her going.\u00a0 The set up of the mystery is more involving than the solution,\u00a0 but the relationship between McKenna and her husband, riven with suspicion as they both search for the truth about their mutual friend, is interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/p>\n

The novel is told in the third person from Joanna’s point of view and in the first by her predecessor as Alistair’s wife, Alexandra. FitzGerald moves backwards and forwards in time, making it clear during the narrative that Joanna stands trial for murder but withholding the details. She tightens the readers’ nerves inch by inch as she takes us through the weeks after Noah’s ‘disappearance’. There are plenty of twists to keep us guessing, while the emotional intensity of the novel is increased by the directness and conversational informality of the style. FitzGerald picks just the right small physical details to skewer each agonizing moment […] 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-4482","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\/4482","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=4482"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4493,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4482\/revisions\/4493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}