criminals

Review: “No One Will Know”

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★★★

Eve Sylvester thinks that after meeting her lover’s family in Australia she’s going to be sailing around the world with the man of her dreams. Then a tragic accident turns her life inside out. It leaves her disoriented, broke, alone, basically friendless and this shocking development makes her feel nothing good can ever happen to her again.

The tide seems to turn though, dramatically. Despite being completely unqualified, she’s offered a job as a nanny and ends up on a small island off the coast of Tasmania employed by a very wealthy young couple of shipping magnates. As you’d expect from the title, the job that seems to be too good to be true turns out to be a nightmare.

Complete with a Mrs. Danvers figure, this is another update of the popular Gothic formula dating back to Ann Radcliffe: a damsel in distress has to navigate the mysteries of a remote castle or mansion. In this case, the dwelling comes with a lovely summerhouse. And a yacht. 

While you expect twists and turns in a novel of suspense like No One Will Know, except for the very last one they’re undercut because the heroine is so clueless and naive.  At pretty much every turn, Eve misreads people and situations, and finds herself trapped in misery, lies, threatened with mortal danger.  Most surprising of all, though, is that Eve makes an almost catastrophic mistake when taking a boat out to sea even though she’s supposed to be a fairly seasoned sailor.

Right after that, the book’s momentum takes a massive hit.  The structure changes radically: we switch point of view to someone far less interesting than Eve and plunge into some very long flashbacks.  A secret that has been lurking at the edge of the narrative is explained and it’s not dramatic enough. But that’s just the appetizer for a bigger, more horrible secret that reveals just how despicable and sociopathic the people around Eve really are.  Not quite the gang in Rosemary’s Baby, but close enough.

The author is at her best when she describes the forlorn island and the waters around it, and when she writes about the powerful bond between mothers and their babies. In the end, this novel is both horrifying and heart-warming, and that’s not an easy mix to pull off.

Lev Raphael reviewed crime fiction at The Detroit Free Press for many years. He has taught mystery and suspense fiction at Michigan State University and  mystery writing at numerous writers’ conferences. His suspense novel Assault With a Deadly Lie was a Midwest Book Award nominee.

 

 

 

 

“City on Fire” Has Big Aspirations

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In my many years as a book reviewer I’ve seen publishers wildly hype their books as if the whole publicity department was on coke, but the jacket copy for Don Winslow’s latest book hits a new high for hyperbole.

His publisher lauds the book as “a towering achievement of storytelling genius” and “a contemporary Iliad.”  I guess they had no choice about the latter label since the author heads each section of the book with an epigraph from that poem.

But City on Fire is not an epic and doesn’t deserve that kind of adulation.  It’s a fairly clichéd story about warring Irish and Italian mobsters that feels as if the author binge-watched The Departed, GoodFellas, The Godfather and The Sopranos (and possibly Casino) before hitting his laptop. 

Familiarity isn’t the only problem. The characters are pretty one-dimensional and Winslow introduces too many of them too quickly, without enough identifying traits to make them clearly individualized.

One Amazon reviewer tartly observed that too many characters in the book have similar names: “You need a note card to keep track of who is on which side.”  Why didn’t Winslow’s editor suggest more variety?  That would have fixed passages like this one:

“They walk out onto the beach, where Pat’s helping Pasco dig clams out from the pit, and Peter and Paulie and their crew are standing there watching them.”

There’s a seemingly endless series of hits and counter-hits that can make you feel trapped in a violent Groundhog’s Day. And who thought it was a good idea to have several chapters of flashback after the opening chapter?  Or later on, dedicate almost twenty pages to one character’s backstory? 

As for the upper-crust femme fatale Pam who’s the catalyst for escalating violence, she’s way too bland and her Greenwich, Connecticut background too clichéd.  There’s also something comical about her being described as wearing a bikini “that does more to accentuate than conceal” her body.  Aren’t bikinis revealing by definition? Doesn’t the publisher employ copy editors?

When writing about Pam, Winslow can sound like a bad romance novelist.  Describing her transformation from a plain, acne-ridden girl to a beauty, he says this:

“It would be an exaggeration to say that it happened overnight, but it seemed to have happened overnight.  Looking into the mirror to scrub her face, she saw skin that was almost clear, as if some compassionate goddess had come during the night and stripped her of her shame….Over the next few weeks, the sun turned her skin a clear tan, baked her body into fine marble, bleached her ‘mousy’ hair to a golden blond, her eyes an oceanic blue.”

On the plus side, there are intriguing and sometimes humorous details about Rhode Island, a state most Americans don’t know much about.  By far the strongest aspect of City on Fire is the tough guy voice, but it’s not enough to carry the slow-moving and overly talky story for 350+ pages.  The heavy use of the present tense makes the book drag even more. 

In the end, epigraphs from The Iliad do not transmogrify any of the criminals in this book into Greek or Trojan heroes.  They just make everyone seem puny.


Lev Raphael was the longtime crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press before moving to public radio where he had his own interview show.