{"id":2135,"date":"2012-07-30T06:28:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T06:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2135"},"modified":"2012-07-31T06:49:59","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T06:49:59","slug":"the-silence-by-alison-bruce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2135","title":{"rendered":"The Silence by Alison Bruce"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Constable 19 July 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

320 pp, hardback, \u00a318.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Debbie Taylor<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hoping to do for Cambridge what Colin Dexter did for Oxford with his Morse series is crime novelist Alison Bruce \u2013 but her maverick D.C. Gary Goodhew is no Endeavour\u00a0 Morse. In fact the one real flaw in this otherwise engrossing and well-plotted novel is the oddly flat characterization of her main protagonist. So although we first encounter Goodhew doggedly disobeying orders, as per, and nabbing a ne\u2019er-do-well in a dark alley while the rest of the force is impotently occupied elsewhere, there\u2019s little in Bruce\u2019s depiction of our hero to set him apart from the Kincaids and Markses of the team.<\/p>\n

The story proper opens with a stabbing \u2013 in the jugular, with a flat-head screwdriver, in the car park of the Carlton Arms \u2013 of local high-school alumnus-turned-computer-whiz Joey McCarthy by a shadowy assailant who darkly declares, \u2018I know everything<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n

Jump-cut to A-level student Libby Brett sending confessional Facebook messages to a curiously laconic school friend of her older sister Rosie. It emerges that sister Rosie nipped out to the cinema one evening three years back and ended up tumbling from a motorway bridge on the A14 and splatting onto and under various speeding vehicles on the road below. Libby\u2019s never accepted the verdict of suicide, either for Rosie or for brother Nathan, who snuffed it shortly afterwards, and she\u2019s using this faceless Facebook correspondence as a way of mulling over their deaths.<\/p>\n

As a flashback device this just about works and gives us an engaging first person narrator to care about and (later) fear for \u2013 which is perhaps why Goodhew and associated police procedural shenanigans seem somewhat uninvolving by comparison.<\/p>\n

Young Libby lives chastely with Matt (who is dead brother Nathan\u2019s erstwhile best friend) in a big shared house with a motley collection of musical-bed-playing students, including earnest American misfit Shanie, who is teased by the others and goes missing. The house is jointly rented, in absentia<\/em>, by Libby\u2019s and Matt\u2019s respective fathers, who presumably have keys to all the rooms. Alone in the house one day, Libby overhears someone sneaking up and down the stairs, unlocking everyone\u2019s doors. Later a faint smell of rotting meat starts to permeate the corridor outside Shanie\u2019s room\u2026<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself, because this book is all about backstory, and how past events have brought all these characters together in the present. Matt\u2019s mother died recently of cancer, brought on, Matt believes, by the stress of marriage to his alcoholic father \u2013 to whom he\u2019s therefore not speaking. Libby\u2019s parents are both alive, but similarly estranged. Who is this mysterious school friend Libby is writing to? Why was expat Shanie living in the shared house in the first place? And how is middle-aged Joey McCarthy\u2019s screwdriver stabbing related to all these teenage deaths?<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, back at police headquarters, P.C. Gully has the hots for D.C. Goodhew, D.C. Goodhew continues to disobey orders, and D.C. Kincaid is behaving in an oddly distracted manner – possibly due to the presence of Matt\u2019s older sister Charlotte, a testosterone magnet of such inexplicable strength for various members of the police force, and so tangential to the main plot, that I can only assume she has appeared in a previous novel in the series.<\/p>\n

Those who know and love Cambridge will revel in the local detail in this book, with individual streets, cafes and eateries all described with affectionate familiarity. But it\u2019s the fate any crime novelist who lights on a winning rubric \u2013 Cambridge plus Goodhew in this case \u2013 that they are forced to engineer any future story so that it will fit into the same rubric. Some, like Karin Slaughter, accomplish this feat relatively seamlessly. Others \u2013 notably Tess Gerritsen in her recent The Bone Garden<\/em> \u2013 crudely top and tail what should by rights be a stand-alone novel with a few derisory scenes with trademark long-term characters. With The Silence<\/em>, Alison Bruce has constructed an ingenious novel that just about holds its two main elements together and leaves the new reader curious to discover more about Goodhew, Gully et al.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Debbie Taylor<\/p>\n

Young Libby lives chastely with Matt (who is dead brother Nathan\u2019s erstwhile best friend) in a big shared house with a motley collection of musical-bed-playing students, including earnest American misfit Shanie, who is teased by the others and goes missing. The house is jointly rented, in absentia, by Libby\u2019s and Matt\u2019s respective fathers, who presumably have keys to all the rooms. Alone in the house one day, Libby overhears someone sneaking up and down the stairs, unlocking everyone\u2019s doors. Later a faint smell of rotting meat starts to permeate the corridor outside Shanie\u2019s room\u2026[…] 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-2135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2135"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2142,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135\/revisions\/2142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}