Just outside of Southampton, UK, a happy young couple are on a camping trip. Their tent is shabby and worn, but that hardly matters to them: they get drunk, they make out, they fall asleep happy. But when the woman wakes up, she is alone. Her fiancé is gone. She calls out for him, but he doesn’t reply. None of the other campers have spotted him; he appears to have vanished into thin air.
Miles away, the boyfriend is in the middle of the woods, being hunted by a nonce with a crossbow because Arlidge’s strengths don’t reside within the realms of the subtle.
The good: it’s a pretty tense thriller that kept me guessing for a while, and though its attempts to put me on the wrong foot were a bit obvious – you already know the guy they arrest in the first third of the book isn’t going to be the one they’re looking for – the actual whodunnit is pretty well constructed, and the machinations of the police investigation are solid and seem realistic, at least to someone like me who gets all of their knowledge from police procedurals on TV. There are a few that-doesn’t-work-like-thats to move the plot forward that felt like lazy writing or a cheap way out of a dead end in the plot, but overall, the mystery itself is well done.
This book is part 8 in a series that focuses on detective Helen Grace. I’ve read two books in the series before, one of which was okay. The other one (the first outing) was absolutely terrible. Chalk it up to Arlidge finding his feet as an author; he started his career as a script writer for shows such as Silent Witness and EastEnders, shows which aren’t known for their nuanced takes on things either. What they do have is a break-neck pace, and that is kept up for most of the novel. It begins to drag towards the end, which is unusual for such a high-octane author.
What bugs me here, though, is that while Arlidge can construct a plot without tripping over his own feet, he’s hopeless at character development. Grace herself is a bit of a mess, both from a personal and textual point of view: a hopeless loner with a troubled backstory that rivals the most ludicrous plotlines, and an inability to commit to anything except for the job. Other characters are treated likewise: the descriptions of their private lives all seem shoehorned and forced, like the author’s editor made him include it. It never fits the story, it takes away from more interesting matters and worse, the characters rarely make sense. Details from previous books are forgotten or conveniently changed. And honestly, I wouldn’t mind if he’d left out their private lives. So many authors think that a troubled main character makes for an interesting main character, but if the whodunnit is the heart of the story, does it really matter if the protagonist simply goes home to their partner at the end of the night and sits down for a cheerful fry-up at the kitchen table?
I’m still on the fence about whether these books are worth my time. I’ve hated one and two of them were okay. I might pick up another one at some point in the future, but I’m not convinced that’ll be any better. Arlidge does have potential, but his characters really need to be sorted out.
