Tony R Cox is an ex-provincial UK journalist. The Simon Jardine series is based on his memories of the early 70s - the time of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll - when reporters relied on word of mouth and there was no internet, no mobile phones, not even a fax machine.
Great thrillers keep readers on the edge of their seats as they anticipate the next bout of action or emotion. Grist Mill Road accomplishes this with skill, but it goes a stage further. This is a crime thriller that maintains a stratospherically high level of menace; a book that that is at once disturbing and discomforting, at the same time as being excitingly un-put-down-able.
Think We Need To Talk About Kevin and reverse it, or so you might believe. The initial, stage-setting action is horrifying, but as the reader is drawn further and deeper into a psychological guided tour of terror, it is the clawing wish for justice and a suitably satisfying dénouement that takes over. Yates is a masterful writer with the easy flow and wide vocabulary that ensures that once he has captured the reader’s imagination, it’s never going to be released. He has a literary vice-like grip that is physically and mentally exhausting.
The narrative covers a 26-year gap between the ‘incident’ and the current action of 2008. The link is enhanced by the story coming from the ‘voices’ of the three main characters. There’s a successful, if emotionally and socially challenged, businessman; an ex-finance data employee; and a crime reporter who’s as much in love with news stories as her husband, and who has a fat friend in the gun-wielding police. This is 2008: in 1982 they were pubescent children enjoying the countryside of New York State.
In 1982 we know who did what in all the gory details, but it’s when the three meet again that the mind-churning plot gathers a pace that is both fluent and staccato in its intensity. Relating to the characters is easy – who, after they’ve been made redundant or sacked hasn’t turned to culinary skills as an escape route? – but not so simple as to allow the reader to settle on a single character as their ‘hero’. They are humanly complex, and everyone has fallibilities; some can be fatal.
There is some humour – I laughed out loud at the concept of the pre-teen’s birthday present being a shoot-'em-up video game just days after the lad had witnessed such horror – but it’s in short supply. Grist Mill Road is a psychological thriller that rarely deviates from a twisting and turning plot. No. it doesn’t ‘turn’ - it ‘screws’, and the screw breaks through the wood, and digs deep into the hardest stone beneath. It’s stomach-churning at its mildest; sphincter-clenchingly-gripping at its most incisive.
Grist Mill Road is a superbly written psychological thriller with the power and deadly ferocity of a harpoon. Christopher J. Yates has found his métier , and it mines the darkest depths of the human psyche.
