Tangled Web UK Review February 2009
Bone by Bone by
Carol O'Connell
hbk out December 08
Published by Headline
at £19.99
This author usually writes the Kathleen Mallory NYPD series, but this a one-off crime story, very different in its unusual location and nature.
The action takes place in Coventry, a sleepy little town on the coast of northern California. Twenty years previously, Josh, a teen-age son of the local judge, went missing in the forest with his elder brother Oren. The latter was amongst the prime suspects, as it was assumed that the boy must be dead, but Oren was rapidly sent away and became an Army CID investigator.
The story begins when Oren suddenly returns, having given up his excellent prospects in the military. Josh has begun to return home also, but bone-by-bone, as the title suggests! Parts of his skeleton keep appearing at night on the front porch and after two decades’ delay, Oren begins to search for his brother’s killer. Josh had been an obsessive photographer, mostly snapping the town’s inhabitants in their unguarded moments. A collection of strange folk people the story, from a crooked lawyer to an incompetent sheriff. When Oren was under suspicion many years before, his alibi depended upon married women, to whom he had a fatal attraction. The lawyer’s wife, an alcoholic ornithologist, lives in a tower house and spies on the whole neighbourhood with her balcony telescopes - the storyline cannot be unravelled until late in the book, but it is a compelling read, very different from the usual run of American ‘cop-private-eye-lawyer’ stories.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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