Killing the Shadows (Val McDermid) Conclusion

This last quarter of the book finally picked up the pace enough to be what I’d call “gripping.”  There were some fairly lengthy passages that had me reading a little faster, maybe even breathing a little harder.  These passages are a good example of what a thriller reader looks for in a thriller … “thrills.”  It just would have been nice if they hadn’t all been saved until the end!  I know I whine too much about how long some books are, and when I started this “book club” I stated as my intention to include books that were not more than 300 or 400 pages.  But sure enough, the exceptions I have made to this guideline have turned out to be tedious for me, if not for anyone else.

Fiona’s thwarted attempts to get people to take her seriously, and to get some help finding Kit, are cleverly contrived, and the circumstances that lead to the necessity of her going it alone are quite believable; even sort of familiar to anyone who has had “one of those days.”  The plotting here struck me as quite intelligent, showing the strengths of this author that we, frankly, hadn’t seen all that much of yet.  This smart plotting continues throughout the climactic action of the book, even though the climax is a rather lengthy one, involving a rather cat-and-mouse game of second guessing between the protagonists and the murderer.  Very enjoyable.

One rather droll prose faux pas:  “’…Why don’t you come over and we’ll have a look?’  ‘Now?’ Joanne could hardly believe her luck.  ‘Sure … Get yourself over here and we’ll see what we can dig out.’  Joanne didn’t need asking twice.”  Well, okay, the second asking wasn’t really a question, but…  And after Fiona accidentally kills the murderer,  “[The police] had finally accepted that there had been nothing calculated in her actions; a few seconds either way and the outcome would have been quite different … Somehow, miraculously, she had landed [on his back] at precisely the right moment.”  Did we really need a “miracle” to resolve the climax?  The fact that she took a flying leap off the edge of a ravine to attack him before he could kill Kit was an act of unthinking courage – no miracle necessary.

There was a point earlier on where I had to wonder if we were going to see the mystery of the murderer’s identity solved by the use of the old “identical twin” trick.  We were spared that – sort of; “’It covers all the practical stuff of how he laid his plans and carried them out.  How he gave the Spanish police the slip when he was supposedly over there in Fuengirola.  It turns out he has a cousin who lives in Spain.  This cousin lent Blake his car, and simply stayed at the villa when Blake was over in the UK and Ireland … They looked similar, and as long as the Spanish cops saw someone answering Blake’s description when they cruised past the place a couple of times a day, it never occurred to them that it wasn’t him.’”  Sigh.

And then there’s that “riding into the sunset” scene at the end – always a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, getting botched more often than not; “’… we both reckon we should at least listen to what the other has to say, now the dust has settled.’  Fiona looked out over the Heath.  ‘Is that what’s happened?’  ‘Isn’t that always what happens after the world gets turned upside down?’ Steve said.  ‘Even if it takes a while, the dust always settles.’  Wow.  As if sensing that ending with a Humphrey Bogart-style set of clichés was not satisfying, our author wraps up by having Fiona write a letter to her dead sister, as assigned by her post-traumatic stress counselor to help rid herself of the irrational feelings of guilt she has felt ever since her sister’s murder.  This is well done –a very thoughtful and fitting end to the story, in my opinion.

October’s book of the month; “'Salem's Lot,” by the incomparable Stephen King!

Stephen King's second book, 'Salem's Lot (1975)--about the slow takeover of an insular hamlet called Jerusalem's Lot by a vampire patterned after Bram Stoker's Dracula--has two elements that he also uses to good effect in later novels: a small American town . . . and a mixed bag of rational, goodhearted people, including a writer, who band together to fight that evil.  Simply taken as a contemporary vampire novel, 'Salem's Lot is great fun to read, and has been very influential in the horror genre. But it's also a sly piece of social commentary… - Amazon.com Review  

Before vampires became sympathetic characters with their own alternate worlds, complete with vampire coffee shops and vampire politics, they used to be bad guys, scary not sexy, and they preferred wreaking havoc in horror novels rather than exuding tortured sensitivity in YA coming-of-age fiction. Fortunately, we don’t need to go all the way back to Dracula and Boris Karloff to remember those halcyon days: we have Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot, from 1975. - Booklist

Week 1:  Chapters 1-4 

(First post, 10-10-14)

Week 2:  Chapters 5-9
Week 3:  Chapters 10-13
Week 4:  Chapters 14-Epilogue