Time to Say Goodbye by
Pat MacEnulty
pbk out January 06
(Serpent's Tail)
at £8.99
Pat MacEnulty’s first book, Sweet Fire, about a sympathetic junkie’s search for redemption, gathered in the accolades back in 2003. After The Language of Sharks (2004), an equally acclaimed volume of short stories, this is her first out-and-out crime novel. And a fresh, heart-felt and often poignant one it is too.
Ex-Vietnam veteran Detective Rodney Ellis of the Gainesville, North Florida police force, is a weary man. His ex-partner Willie Price is dying of cancer; he himself is tired of filing reports, tired of “day in day out mayhem”, tired, whilst investigating the murder of Thelma Jackson, a middle-aged motel maid, of talking to “broken-hearted mothers”. As he investigates he comes across some current echoes (a face from the past, a mention of a rare gun) of a still-disturbing case from his early years as a police officer, a 16 year-old girl tried and convicted of a triple murder. Echoes perhaps, which, if investigated, in his own time if need be, might throw new light on both past and present...
Rodney is a substantial, multi-faceted character in a book overflowing with them. Along with the purple-haired Twyla, the police records clerk with a master’s degree in English, or Lanelle, Rodney’s new Buddha-like female partner, there is clearly material here for a series. Even more distinctive is the key plot strand introduced early in the book centred around Patsy Palmer, a successful real estate saleswoman from land-locked Charlotte, North Carolina. She is outwardly confident, happily married with two great kids. But with an abiding fear of water and a strange line in bedtime stories, clearly not all is as it seems. Plagued, in fact, by disjointed memories of her damaged former life, Patsy senses that her carefully created suburban existence is about to come apart at the seams.
As MacEnulty’s credible, well-structured and unerringly paced plot unfolds (Rodney’s investigation cleverly filling in many, though not all, of the gaps in Patsy’s memory), a complex portrait emerges of an ill-starred woman drawing on her own considerable mental strength to preserve all that she holds dear whilst struggling to evade the clutches of the past. The book’s climax in a Florida hurricane, as key elements of the plot finally and movingly coalesce, is outstanding.
Let's hope there will be more where this came from. Meanwhile I’m off to check out Sweet Fire, also from Serpent’s Tail.
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Time to Say Goodbye by
Pat MacEnulty
