Now You See Me by S. J. Bolton

 Reviewed by Jeanne

Policewoman Lacey Flint meets a dead woman standing by her car.  Technically, the woman is still alive but at the rate blood is spewing forth it’s obvious that her life span is now to be measured in seconds.  There’s no sign of the slayer; the women still wears expensive jewelry, though her purse is gone.  There’s no identification on her, no cell phone, no car keys.  As the police struggle to identify the victim, a reporter turns up with a letter that refers to Lacey and to the crime, using phrases that would sound alarm bells for any historical crime buff: 

Saucy Jacky is back.

As a child, Lacey was fascinated by Jack the Ripper so she knows what the letter means.  She also realizes that the woman was murdered on the same day as the Ripper’s first known victim, and that the wounds are similar.  It soon becomes apparent that someone is replicating some of those crimes and the police are racing against time to prevent more murders. It’s also apparent that the killer is fixated on Lacey, who has some things in her past that she’d rather forget.

Bolton is a British thriller writer whose books tend to follow a certain follow a pattern, though they aren’t formulaic. Her novels usually feature a strong, gutsy female lead with a damaged past and a willingness to sometimes rush in where angels fear to tread if she feels someone is in danger.  There is a well developed supporting cast of characters.  Bolton also does a wonderful job with setting, describing places in vivid and tactile terms, and knows just what buttons to push to ratchet up the tension.  In her previous books, she kept the violence a bit removed by placing it in the past but in this book certain things are immediate and visceral—no pun intended.  She can take something ordinary and make it frightening.  For example, the song “My Favorite Things” runs all through the book; it was one of Lacey’s favorite songs, one she found comforting in difficult times.  I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to listen to that song again without feeling a sense of unease.

Another factor is always the past:  not just the characters’ pasts—which are important—but history and folklore always figure into the story in some fashion.  Legend is as apt to lead you down a wrong path as a right one; figuring out the important bits is part of the puzzle.  Bolton’s books are good illustrations of the Faulkner quotation that the past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.

Finally, Bolton’s solutions are complex and riveting; there are twists you don’t see coming.  That’s true of this book in particular. It makes it a little difficult to do a review in some ways, because to do it justice the reviewer would have to reveal some things best left for the reader to discover. She also doesn’t seem to believe in the pat happy ending; not all of her books end with folks walking off into the sunset together, holding hands.

I’m not a fan of graphic violence so some sections were definitely unsettling; but I can offer the same comment about many current thrillers and forensic books. (And, to be fair, there are other thrillers that are much more graphic.)  I did enjoy the characters and the plotting, the attention to detail and the bits of “Ripper-lore”—I can always count on Ms. Bolton to do her homework in such things!—and the ending was a shocker. 

Snakes alive: Awakening by S. J. Bolton

Awakening by S. J. Bolton (F BOL Main)

Reviewed by Jeanne

Clara Benning is a veterinary surgeon specializing in wildlife rehabilitation in a small English village, a position she chose, in part, because it allows her minimal contact with people.Clara was horribly injured as a child and those physical scars have made her reluctant to expose herself to the stares and comments people are prone to make. Besides, she likes animals of all sorts, and working with wildlife means she doesn’t often have to deal with any owners:only the animal itself.Her reclusive ways don’t endear her to the villagers but she’s known to be very good at her work and very knowledgeable--which is why she gets the call that changes her life.

With the exception of the adder, most British snakes are quite harmless to humans.That fact is lost on the hysterical mother who calls Clara. She only knows that there is a snake in her daughter’s crib. Clara rushes over, expecting to find a grass or garter snake, but realizes to her horror that it is indeed an adder lying on the infant’s chest. Using all her skills, she tries to extricate the snake before the baby can be harmed.

This turns out to be just the beginning. A man dies, apparently from snakebite, but the amount of venom is more than one snake could possibly produce. A deadly taipan— a snake native to Australia and New Guinea—shows up in the village. It isn’t long before both Clara and the authorities realize that something very unnatural is going on, and that there must be a human hand behind some of these “accidents.”

The difference is that the police think that hand might belong to Clara.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bolton’s first book, Sacrifice, and Awakening was just as exciting. She has the knack of creating memorable characters as well as supplying the reader with a great deal of factual information without lecturing. In this book, she brings in a lot of snake lore as well as Roman customs and –amazingly enough!—information about the snake-handling churches in America.(Clara is the daughter of an Anglican bishop and so is conversant with the relevant scripture.) Her settings are wonderfully realized:I could almost smell the damp and feel the chill of the stone in the house. Her prose is clear and clean, and she uses both character and place to ratchet up the tension.

A colleague was disturbed by the revelation as to how Clara came to be disfigured as a baby.I was so anxious to find out how the story turned out that I confess I skimmed over that section but as I recall the violence was strongly implied rather than graphic.

There are some injuries to animals in the book, something else I usually find off-putting, but Bolton handles it sensitively. The underlying respect and love that Clara has for her charges helped in that respect.The enthusiasm of a globe-trotting herpetologist for all things serpentine felt genuine, although I still don’t want my own snake, thank you very much.

However, I do want another book by S. J. Bolton. Her next one is entitled Blood Harvest and is scheduled for June, 2010.