True Crime writer Wylie’s life is a mess: she’s divorced, she’s having a fight with her teenage son, and there’s a book that needs finishing, so she does what any sane person would do: rent the house where the crime she’s writing about took place (the place has been uninhabited for twenty years, but is somehow still livable, unvandalised, and connected to the grid) so she can finish her novel. Of course, a snow storm rears its head, cutting off the electricity. Of course, she drops her phone in a puddle, thereby destroying it. Of course, a mysterious child pops up on her porch. At this point, do I really need to tell you there’s a homicidal maniac stalking the premises?
The summary makes it sound like I hated the book. I didn’t, really; it was fast-paced fun, but it’s also the sort of book that latches one trope onto the next, from amazing coincidences to the Scoobydooesque ‘twas-I-all-along that I could see coming from miles away. The novel’s pace is so break-neck that character development is largely absent. Some characters simply vanish from the story, as if the author didn’t need them anymore and didn’t see the point in giving them any form of closure. They’re either ignored completely or their fate is left hanging in the balance.
The story is told through various perspectives, some of them for several chapters, some of them only briefly. We read about the now, with Wylie doing her best to keep the child safe, and the events of twenty-odd years before – the homicide that is the subject of Wylie’s book – where a family is brutally murdered; only their twelve year old daughter gets away. Of course, the two crimes turn out to be connected; that was clear to me long before the author revealed it.
What this book does do really well is action-packed scenes. Writing those can be hard, because the writing has to be concise yet clear. Authors need to give the audience enough to visualise the setting, but not so much that it becomes convoluted. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk, and Gudenkauf manages that quite well. And Wylie, as a main character, manages to be inventive without being unrealistically competent in times of crisis.
Is Scoobydooesque a word? It should be.
