Joan Brady’s previous books include Theory of War, a powerful historical novel which won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. Now she has written a thriller. It is set in Springfield, Illinois, once the home of Abraham Lincoln and now a prosperous city overshadowed by an unholy alliance of politicians, cops, lawyers and bankers. No one, however, doubts the integrity of Hugh Freyl, whose family has dominated the city’s public life for generations. Like justice itself, Hugh is blind, which means he cannot see the face of the person who bludgeons him to death in the library of his own law firm.
The novel has a double narrative in which each strand enriches and comments on the other. The first leads away from the murder and charts the efforts of David Marion, a convicted double murderer whom Hugh has rehabilitated, to discover who killed his patron. In the eyes of the world, including Hugh’s mother and the police, David himself is the obvious suspect. Sometimes even David finds it hard to believe his own innocence.
The second narrative, intercut with the first, belongs to Hugh himself, speaking (presumably) from some celestial vantage point beyond the grave and leading towards his own murder. After the onset of blindness and the death of his wife, he throws himself into educating long-term prisoners in the maximum security South Hams state prison. David Marion, charismatic, highly intelligent and as tough as they come, is Hugh’s star pupil, and Hugh’s struggle to have him released from prison is one of the most moving parts of the book.
Back in the present, David’s investigation into Hugh’s murder brings him up against financial fraud, political skul- duggery and police corruption. It also takes him back to his own past, to the murders which led to his conviction at the age of 15, and to the grimly anarchic mirror city that lies across the railway tracks from its wealthier and outwardly more respectable neighbour. David’s motto is ‘The past is a waste of time’, but even he is forced to accept that only the past can explain the present.
This novel, like all the best thrillers, is fuelled by outrage — against the inhumanity of the American prison system, and against the iniquities of its politicians and financiers. Like so many protagonists, David is an outsider with almost super- human powers in a society where outsiders are either scorned or feared. Attractive women fall at his feet. The other characters are also traditional in the sense that they tend to be larger than life and have strong, simple emotions. Thrillers usually purvey information, and Brady gives us plenty of hard facts about the brutality of prison life, the technicalities of corporate fraud and the place of Habeas Corpus in the American legal system.
But Brady is far too good a novelist to allow the thriller formula to enslave her. Instead she turns it inside out and makes something new from its clichés. Her narrative produces a steady trickle of shocks and surprises. The book isn’t perfect — the ending is rushed and cheats the reader of a proper climax — but it has the priceless advantages of intelligent writing, an unusual slant and anger so sharp you can cut yourself on it.
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is The American Boy (HarperPerennial).
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