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Fever of the Bone by Val McDermid

Ms McDermid is one of my great discoveries of 2009 (apologies to crime-thriller devotees who have been much quicker off the bat than I). The Scottish writer has produced several series of thrillers with different protagonists, and the stars of her latest, Fever of the Bone, are Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan and clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill, who have appeared together (but achingly apart) in five previous novels. McDermid is getting such mileage out of the two in part through her clever use of a classic dramatic device – unrealized yearning. They both have serious emotional baggage, Hill from the abandonment of his father (much more of which is revealed in a terrific sub-plot in this book) and Jordan from causes unspecified but manifesting in booze consumption that far exceeds Ministry of Health guidelines for responsible drinking. They live on two different floors of the same house, which doesn’t help with the yearning factor.

The story kicks off with an unwelcome development for Jordan – the new head of her division takes a dislike to the closeness of the relationship between Jordan and Hill, and instructs Jordan to stop using Hill’s services, on the pretext that he is costly, and take on an unhelpful new graduate instead. Hill gets embroiled in the investigation of a murder which turns out to be linked to two other murders Jordan’s team is investigating – all are teenagers who are connected through their membership of RigMarole, a MySpace-style social networking website.

Someone is targeting the teens and tricking them into meeting in person, then inflicting gruesome injuries on them before dispatching them altogether. (Val McDermid has said that, as a female crime writer, she tends to see things from the victim’s point of view and thus avoids unnecessary or gratuitous descriptions of violence – but if you find an average episode of CSI a bit hard to stomach, this book, which features some sexual mutilation, might be a bit steep for you. But you’d be missing out. Just saying.)

We’re off and running, then, in search of the killer (or killers) and the answer to the question of why these teens (all only children, there’s a hint) are being picked off. Meanwhile, the Hill father-son storyline unfolds and inflicts its seismic effect on Hill’s psyche, and there’s the supremely satisfying wrap-up of a cold case.

Like all McDermid novels, Fever of the Bone is carefully constructed to deliver a massive twist right at the end. I defy even the most seasoned crime-thriller readers to see it coming.

Day After Night by Anita Diamant

Anita Diamant made her name as an historical novelist with The Red Tent, a retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, and with Day After Night, she gives voice to women of more recent times – specifically, the inhabitants of Atlit, a detention centre run by the British in Palestine as part of the resettlement programme for European Jews after World War II. Set in the summer of 1945, the novel focuses on four young women who are interned at Atlit and turn to each for support and succour as they plan their escape (the breaking-out from Atlit recounted in the book is based on real historical events).

I must confess to a woeful lack of knowledge about this specific period in history – reading this book proved very edifying, largely because it had never occurred to me to wonder what happened to Europe’s surviving Jews (and non-Jewish refugees who simply wanted shot of that continent forever) between the liberation of the Nazi camps in 1945 and the formal establishment of the state of Israel in 1947. I learned that people fled to Eretz Israel, the biblical name for the ancestral homeland of the Jews, and those who were ‘paperless’, without identification, were held at Atlit, in British-controlled Palestine, until they could be processed and released to live in a kibbutz. Given that the British refused permission for anyone to immigrate in the first place, the process tended to take a while.

It is into this morass that our four traumatized heroines descend: Zorah, an Auschwitz survivor, Tedi, a Dutch Jew who was hidden by a family in the countryside, Shayndel, a Polish Zionist who fought with the partisans, and Leonie, a beauty who was forced into prostitution in Paris. All are young – there was no one over the age of 21 in Atlit at the time in which this story takes place – and all have lost their families. They are dealing with grief, survivor’s guilt, and varying degrees of rage at what has become of their lives.

Diamant isn’t the greatest wordsmith – her talents lie in embellishing real stories, making them readable and capturing the remarkable and unique relationships that women forge with each other. She’s been accused of being one-dimensional in her approach to women’s voices, but for me, the special setting of this book, which has been overlooked by novelists, outweighs any such quibbles.

Kerre and I did agree that the novel ends too abruptly – there is a resolution, but you’re left wanting more. The upside is that it may inspire you, as it did me, to reading more about Atlit, Eretz Yisrael and the British Mandate in Palestine. For anyone partial to a moving and well-researched historical novel with strong characterization, Day After Night will make for satisfying reading.

Tags: Alexander Communications, Anita Diamant, Day After Night, Fever of the Bone, Kerre Woodham, Kerre's Cafe Reviews, Stephanie Jones, Val McDermid

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 11:10 am and is filed under Latest News, Parsing the Page (Steph's book blog). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.