Strangers

Written by C L Taylor

Review written by Jon Morgan

Jon Morgan is a retired police Superintendent and francophile who, it is said, has consequently seen almost everything awful that people can do to each other. He relishes quality writing in all genres but advises particularly on police procedure for authors including John Harvey and Jon McGregor. Haunts bookshops both new and secondhand and stands with Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I may buy food and clothes.”


Strangers
Avon
RRP: £12.99
Released: April 02, 2020
Pbk

A set of strangers, all with their own problems, be it PTSD; incipient kleptomania; job insecurity; bullied children or cheating partners and in some cases several of these at once, could make for a fairly miserable account of people struggling to survive in gig-economy Britain. Except that it doesn’t!

There is no apparent connection as we spend the vast majority of the book getting to know them and the Bristol they inhabit. Gareth (and his dementia-affected mother) Alice, Emily, Ursula (I liked Ursula and her very mismatched partner, Nathan.) Against the backdrop of people disappearing and turning up rather wet and very dead in the Avon, the characters struggle to live their lives, coping with their different problems.

I know that this sounds depressing but the air of menace and foreboding that follows them, is carefully crafted and built through what is essentially ‘pedestrian’ writing. I do not mean that in a negative sense, as it appears wholly deliberate, so as to emphasise and reinforce the ordinary, humdrum and frequently desperate nature of their existence.

The victims of the so called and possibly illusory ‘Harbourside Murderer’ as ‘he’ is dubbed on the apparently random excerpts from some form of social media are seemingly surplus to the plot but do not be fooled! In a fairly gripping set of twists, all of the major characters, as well as a couple of the minor ones, are brought together and many of the parallel plot issues resolved as well as explained. This is not to say that everything turns out well for all and it is far from Voltair’s Candide-like denouement where ‘everything is the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ The last chapter is a further and final twist where a very minor character, hardly noticed before, comes to the fore.

I don’t much like the inclusion of what are effectively printouts or screen grabs from social media in novels, but they are, I suppose, necessarily becoming as common as a phone conversation. Here, their apparent randomness and irrelevance to the plot made them especially effective.

This was a good read, and a ‘page-turner,’ well worth trying if, like me you have not come across her work before.



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