Roger Brunyate's Reviews > What She Knew

 
A Debut That Tries Too Hard

Three and a half stars. That's my immediate reaction to this debut thriller. By the time I have finished this review, I will know whether to round up or down.

On the plus side, the underlying situation is strong. Eight-year-old Benedict Finch vanishes in the woods near Bristol, when his mother allows him to run ahead to a favorite spot. The story is told in two main voices. One is Ben's mother, Rachel Jenner, recently divorced from John Finch, a pediatric surgeon. The other is Jim Clemo, the Detective Inspector assigned to the case. So the book proceeds alternately as a police procedural and a psychological thriller; no harm in that, if the author can maintain the balance. The day-by-day account is bookended by a prologue and epilogue set a year later. The prologue make it clear that the case has been traumatic for all concerned. So we expect something bad, but have no idea what. The result was a mystery that kept me reading. Kudos on that.

But Gilly Macmillan cannot help but tip the balance to the psychological side, I think excessively. Rachel loses control during a live television appeal organized by the police, triggering a malicious backlash in social media, accusing her of the crime. Soon she is subject to physical harassment, so we need to add the woman-in-danger trope to the other genres. Some of Jim's sections take the form of case notes by a psychologist he is forced to consult a year after the event. It is a useful narrative tool that certainly heightens the reader's dread, but even at the end I could not see why Jim was suffering so much, nor why his superiors waited an entire year before sending him for therapy.

I have to say also that there is an awful lot of panting and flailing in the accounts of Rachel's increasing despair and distrust of even her friends and family. But the interior treatment also allows her quieter epiphanies such as this, when she sees the bedroom her ex-husband's new wife has prepared for Ben. Kudos on these too.

I could see that an extraordinary amount of care and attention had gone into the creation of the room. It was painful to me to hear that Katrina had done the work, but not nearly as powerful as the fact that Ben had never once described it to me. "It's beautiful," I said, and I saw suddenly how I'd taken everything Ben told me about his life at his dad's and twisted it into a sordid, unhappy shape.

The police procedural and psychological thriller genres differ in one important respect. The former depends on evidence painstakingly unearthed by the police; the latter thrives on revelations given by the author—and Macmillan does this to excess. There is not a character who will not be the subject of a flashback at some time or another. These provide new psychological information, but it is often of only of peripheral relevance and introduced with crashing gear-changes rather than evolving naturally. For example, Jim Clemo in the grip of insomnia:

When I finally shut my eyes and tried to sleep, my brain had a different plan. It pulled me back to my past, and it did it swiftly, like an ocean current that's merciless and strong. It took me back to my childhood, where it had a memory to replay for me, a videotape of my past that it had dug out of the back of a drawer where I'd shoved it, long ago, hoping to forget.

The memory has the purpose of showing that Jim's father, a detective himself, had feet of clay. But it has no bearing on the case, nor does it really explain why Jim is taking this one so hard. Clearly Macmillan is trying to flesh out the anchor character for her proposed series—but to my mind, this gratuitous information only weakens him.

So far, I was still on the fence. But when Macmillan takes to introducing information in large gobbets on the police side also, rather than through the gradual gathering of facts, I begin to see her inexperience. The effect is to suddenly turn the spotlight on a new suspect—though the astute reader will realize that suspects who emerge early will be eliminated almost equally early. I grew tired of the number of apparent new leads that arrive on the detectives' desks in neat packages out of left field. The camel's straw for me was an enormous family secret involving Rachel and her sister that suddenly comes from nowhere, and which the police then dump on them like a truckload of manure. It is too much information at one time, difficult to believe not only in itself, but also that it has been kept a secret. And I cannot accept that an officer as careful and respectful as DI Clemo has shown himself to be would handle this in such a crude and confrontational manner.

No: Gilly Macmillan, despite all her strengths, simply wanted to spotlight some new suspects and ratchet up the tension. But I resent being so transparently manipulated. Three stars it is.