Book Review: The Invisible Guardian by Dolores Redondo

The Invisible Guardian is the first thriller in Dolores Redondo's Baztán trilogy, set in the densely wooded valleys and remote rural communities of the Basque Country and neighbouring Navarra in Spain. Translated from the Spanish by Isabelle Kaufeler, it crackles with the atmosphere of a region where traditional superstitions still find their way into everyday life.

The story is eerily gripping from the first page, as a young girl's body is discovered in a desolate forest:

Ainhoa Elizasu was the second victim of the basajaun, although the press were yet to coin that name for him. That came later, when it emerged that animal hairs, scraps of skin and unidentifiable tracks had been found around the bodies, along with evidence of some kind of macabre purification rite. With their torn clothes, their private parts shaved and their upturned hands, the bodies of those girls, almost still children, seemed to have been marked by a malign force, as old as the earth.

 

As Inspector Amaia Salazar is put in charge of the investigation, she must return to Elizondo, the village where she was born. But despite being a rising star of the local police force and happily married to her American husband James, Amaia has a dark past. In moving back to Elizondo to pursue a serial killer that the locals believe to be a basajaun - a woodland being with supernatural powers - she also has to face the resurfacing of her own childhood demons:

leading her to wonder whether she had succumbed to what murder investigators fear most: that the horror she faced on a daily basis had broken free of the dark place where it ought to remain locked away and had taken over her life, gradually making her into one of those police officers with no private life, left desolate and isolated in the knowledge that they are responsible for letting the evil break through the barriers and wash everything away.

This is a novel that combines the ancient and modern; local traditions of witches, evil spirits and Amaia's Aunt Engrasi divining the future through Tarot cards, contrasting with the contemporary policing techniques Amaia learnt in her time in America and the scientific laboratory analysis that is the backbone of her investigation.

With its graphic descriptions of the ritualised killing and ensuing autopsies of young girls, their bodies described as the 'sole subject of a murderer's work of art', The Invisible Guardian is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Although fiction, it makes for uncomfortable and voyeuristic reading at times - at least, if you're as much of a wimp as me. Yet, despite the brutality, it's a story that draws you in with its powerful sense of place; as you read, you can almost feel the claustrophobic chill of winter's mist closing in around you.

Dolores Redondo was born in the Basque Country's San Sebastian (Donostia) and, in writing of the country she knows intimately, has produced a hauntingly original novel with an intriguing protagonist who must eventually question every aspect of her past. Her characterisation is always empathetic and the conflicts Amaia faces in her entangled personal and professional life, alongside the simmering resentments she encounters at every turn, are never less than compelling.

As the story hurtles towards its conclusion, there are surprising elements of magical realism that make you feel as though you might have stumbled into a novel by Gabriel García Márquez or Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Yet, in the landscape of which she writes - beautiful by day but menacing and isolated by night - these almost feverish happenings still feel authentic.

Redondo draws all the threads of her narrative together into a satisfying conclusion, but one that leaves room for the English translation of the second in the trilogy, The Legacy of Bones, to provide the next instalment of Amaia Salazar's darkly captivating story later on this year.

The Invisible Guardian by Dolores Redondo is published in the UK by HarperCollins. Many thanks to them for my review copy.

Book Review: A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson

I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel the need for an out-and-out page-turner. A fast-paced, twisting and turning thriller that draws me into reading on until I discover the ending. And while Ben McPherson's A Line of Blood may have a very contemporary north London Finsbury Park setting, a good old-fashioned page-turner it certainly is.

In searching for his errant cat, Alex Mercer stumbles upon his neighbour, dead in the bath. His young son Max is with him and sees much more than he should. What at first looks like a suicide turns into something even darker and, as the police begin to investigate, secrets that have been locked away in closed hearts start tumbling out.

There are the cracks in Alex's tumultuous marriage to Millicent; a shared tragedy in their past they have never truly recovered from. Aspects of Alex's own upbringing also feed into his concern that his own son should not be traumatised by what he's seen. Meanwhile, as the police dredge through the neighbour's past, what they find is increasingly murky and threatens to destroy Alex's family completely:

Millicent was sitting with her head in her hands, tiny against the vast communal table. I sat down beside her; it seemed at first as if she hadn't seen me, as if she were somewhere very private; then she sat up, looked me in the eye, and began to speak.

'I need you to understand that I have never and never would betray you, Alex.'

She hadn't slept. I could see the blood pulsing in her neck, smell the sourness on her breath.

'So I probably need to start with the really bad stuff, and then I can explain - and I hope, I really hope you're going to listen and to understand - how it isn't what it looks like. Because I know it doesn't look so good.'

She reached into her bag and produced a small white envelope; she looked at it for a moment, then handed it to me.

'So this is what the police wanted to discuss with me.' 

The protagonists are unreliable and flawed but still credible; their faults explained by the revelations of their pasts. As the life they've created for themselves begins to fracture, Alex and Millicent remain just about likable enough to retain your sympathy. With plenty of twists and shifts the plot cracks on towards an ending that, although visible a little way off, still scores highly on dramatic tension and shock.

Like his character Alex, Ben McPherson grew up in Scotland before working for many years in film and television in London. Indeed, there is a very fluid, filmic quality to this, his debut novel; it seems ripe for adaptation into a gripping screen thriller. If it's jolts and chills you're after, A Line of Blood will have you hooked, but - a word of warning - set aside the time; despite a mountain of other things I should have been doing, I found myself reading the second half of this book in one sitting.

A Line of Blood is published in the UK by HarperCollins; thanks to them for my review copy.

Book Review: Carrying Albert Home by Homer Hickam

Sometime during the last Millennium, I read a rather wonderful memoir called Rocket Boys about a young lad growing up in a 1950s West Virginia coal-mining town. Captivated by Sputnik, the world's first satellite, flying over his home, fourteen-year-old Homer Hickam decided to build a rocket to rival the Russians'. His predominantly true story of Coalwood's Big Creek Missile Agency was later made into a successful film, October Sky, starring a young Jake Gyllenhaal.

Now, many years later, I felt a thrill of anticipation in reading another book by Hickam about his Coalwood family: Carrying Albert Home. Once again described as a true story 'except the bits that are made up', this is the somewhat tall tale of Hickam's parents, Homer Senior and Elsie.

Growing up together as classmates during the Great Depression, handsome but steady Homer Senior is content to follow his father into the mines, while beautiful, vivacious Elsie dreams of escaping the permanent tang of coal dust in the air and moves to sunny Orlando. There she enjoys a burgeoning romance with aspiring dancer and actor Buddy Ebsen, but, when Buddy heads for New York, Elsie moves back to Coalwood, marries Homer and tries to settle down as a miner's wife.

Yet, a wedding present from Buddy in the shape of an alligator named Albert serves as a persistent reminder for Elsie of all she has lost, as well as a constant source of resentment for Homer. Finally, he issues her with an ultimatum; either the alligator goes, or he does. Thus begins a road trip of almost a thousand miles across several states, to carry Albert back home to the swamps of Orlando.

Told from the point of view of Homer Junior, the story of this trip is revealed in episodes as gradually recounted to him by his mother and father. He learns that, as they packed up their Buick to leave Coalwood, the unlikely trio somehow acquired a rooster as a companion; that a journey scheduled to take two weeks turned into a stormy and fantastical odyssey of many months' duration; Elsie helped John Steinbeck decide the title of his most famous novel and Homer was taught to smoke cigars by Ernest Hemingway.

Along the way, the journey changes them both. As the couple grows closer in the face of adversity, Elsie's sharp tongue softens and Homer's stubbornness subsides. Meanwhile, Homer Junior begins to discover his mother and father as individuals in their own right, not just the parents who raised him:

I didn't know how they came to be married or what shaped them to become the people I know. I also didn't know that my mother carried in her heart an unquenchable love for a man who became a famous Hollywood actor and that my father met that man after battling a mighty hurricane, not only in the tropics but in his soul. The story of Albert taught me these and many other things, not only about my parents but the life they gave me to live and the lives we all live, even when we don't understand why.

And at the centre of it all is the lovable and never to be forgotten Albert; heroic on more than one occasion and an excellent judge of character, bestowing his yeah-yeah-yeah happy sound only on those worthy of it.

It may not have all the youthful impact and vibrancy I remember from Rocket Boys, but Carrying Albert Home is a charming, quirky and often whimsical family epic; one you can imagine evolving with every swing-seat retelling. Verging on the folkishly sentimental, at heart, it is an all-American love story; even with a fair share of tragedy mixed in with the comic, the twinkle in Homer's parents' eyes is never far away.


Image courtesy of homerhickam.com. Carrying Albert Home is published in the UK by HarperCollins; thanks to them for my review copy.