Tag: Erin Kelly

Day 821: Broadchurch

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Cover for BroadchurchMaybe because I so enjoyed the British TV mystery series Broadchurch, it wasn’t such a great idea to read the book. It’s one thing to read the book a series or movie is based on and another to read one based on the series. However, the novel was written by a good British suspense writer, Erin Kelly, so I thought I’d give it a try.

An 11-year-old boy is found dead on a beach in a small town early one morning. Because his paper route gets him out of the house early, his parents haven’t missed him yet.

On the same morning, Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller returns to work from vacation eager to take over her new job as head of investigations. When she arrives, though, she finds the position has gone to a man, Detective Inspector Alec Hardy. Worse, she soon remembers he was lead in a murder case in Sandbrook that went terribly wrong.

Beth Latimer doesn’t realize that her son Danny is missing until she takes his lunchbox to school, thinking he forgot it. His teacher and school mates haven’t seen him. On the drive home, the traffic to the beach is blocked because of a police investigation. Some instinct makes her stop her car and run to the beach.

While the small town tries to cope with the idea that someone among them has murdered the boy, Ellie Miller and Alec Hardy work the evidence trying to find the killer. Alec is brusque and rude and constantly reminds Ellie that she can’t trust people. Ellie thinks her strength lies in her knowledge of these people, particularly the Latimers, who are her family’s best friends. As the town’s suspicions turn from one person to another, she has to reassess this idea.

A stranger to town is also looking for trouble. Reporter Karen White has Hardy on her radar, after she figures he bungled the Sandbrook case. He didn’t, but the truth takes a while to come out.

Honestly, if you have already seen Broadchurch, this novel doesn’t add anything to it except for more insight into what some of the characters are thinking. The ending has a few extra scenes that only draw it out unnecessarily. The final scene, which I found touching in the series, is a bit too much because it’s from the point of view of the boy’s mother.

However, if you have not seen the series, this book is a perfectly good murder mystery. The characters and situation are interesting, the solution quite a shock.

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The Dark Rose

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Day 429: The Dark Rose

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Cover for The Dark RoseThe Dark Rose is the story of how the lives of two troubled people intersect, with unfortunate results.

Louisa has had a secret for 20 years that changed her life. In flashbacks to 1989, she meets Adam, a singer and bassist in a local rock band, and falls immediately in love. For the first time, she is not the one in charge of her own love life, and he is in turn attentive and evasive, loving and impatient. Louisa is eaten up by jealousy, especially when his band mates make jokes about his relationships with other women. No good comes of this situation.

In the present time, 19-year-old Paul has been forced to testify against his friend Daniel. They have a long-standing friendship that Paul has been wanting to escape. As boys Daniel protected Paul from bullies while Paul kept others from finding out that Daniel was illiterate. But Daniel’s father is a criminal, and Daniel has begun involving Paul in illegal activities just as Paul is trying to begin a new life at university.

While he awaits Daniel’s trial, Paul is sent out of the area for his own protection to help with a project restoring a Tudor garden to its former glory. On site he meets Louisa, the head gardener, who is struck by Paul’s resemblance to her long lost love.

Kelly does a good job of keeping up the suspense, telling the interleaved stories of the young Louisa from 20 years before and of Paul’s more recent history. Although you become aware that each story involves some horrendous event, she spins out her tale so that events are revealed toward the end of the novel. Still, all is not over.

I found The Dark Rose less satisfying than The Poison Tree, Kelly’s debut. Paul and Louisa are definitely more flawed and less likable than the previous book’s heroine. Still, we want to find out what happens to them.

Erin Kelly has been likened to Gillian Flynn or Tana French. I am always skeptical of such comparisons (“If you like so-and-so, you’ll love . . .”), and I prefer the work of Flynn and French. However, Kelly does have a comparable dark sensibility. I just think Flynn and French are better at getting you to sympathize with their main characters, even though they are invariably flawed (except for Gone Girl, that is, where no characters are sympathetic).

A warning about this book if you shop in used book stores. I bought it a second time by accident because the British edition is under a different title, The Sick Rose.

Day 98: The Poison Tree

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Cover for The Poison TreeWhat starts out as a seemingly ordinary novel about a young woman who makes a fascinating, exotic new friend builds slowly to the macabre in The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly. This is not a traditional mystery, but more the foreboding story of how several characters’ lives are changed irrevocably by the incidents of a careless summer in 1993.

In a story that begins ten years before the novel’s present, Karen Clarke is a naive but high-achieving linguistics student who is soon to graduate from a college in London. Her academic success has more to do with a natural ability to learn languages than application, and she finds herself unable to decide what to do with her life. After being very focused for years, she is inclined to let her near-term future be decided by fate.

One afternoon near the end of the term she meets the flamboyant, charismatic Biba Capel and is immediately captivated by her and drawn into her circle. Biba lives in a sprawling, ramshackle house with her brother Rex and other assorted people, and they spend most of their time partying.

The novel’s present day begins with Karen picking up her husband, Rex Capel, from prison, where he has served 10 years for murder. With her is their ten-year-old daughter Alice. Karen has been supporting her small family, economically and emotionally, for years, and knows she must continue to do so, as Rex will find it difficult to get work. She is very protective of Rex and Alice and afraid their new life will be ruined if people learn about their past.

How Karen goes from the carefree life she adopts that summer—which she spends with a bunch of irresponsible young people partying all night and sleeping all day—to the fearful present involves the Capels’ tragic history. As she learns about this history and learns more about her friend, she is drawn into tragedy.

Well written and absorbing, the book slowly builds from normalcy to a sense of dread.