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.”
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.
