  Before the Poison |
Before the Poison
By Peter Robinson
McClelland & Stewart
In Before the Poison, acclaimed Canadian crime novelist Peter Robinson again departs -- as he has a couple of times before -- from his bestselling Inspector Banks series.
The result is a hybrid fiction combining a crime investigation of sorts with a study of a man wrestling with grief, as well as some historical horrors.
Robinson does stick, however, to his usual setting -- the Yorkshire where he himself grew up -- in introducing Chris Lowndes, a Yorkshireman who has lived many years in California, where he has become an Oscar-winning composer of movie scores.
Now in his 60s and trying to recover from the death of his wife, Laura, he has retired to a grand-but-isolated Yorkshire property to try to restore himself, and also to write music that will stand on its own, not the background kind nobody especially notices.
What he finds at the property, called Kilnsgate, is an intriguing history that draws him into researching the life and death of a previous resident, Grace Fox, hanged in 1953 for the murder of her husband, Dr. Ernest Fox.
Hers is an interesting enough story, but it begins to compel Lowndes more powerfully than seems explicable for most of the novel. With a single-mindedness that worries both old and new acquaintances, he sets out to not only figure out what happened, but also to exonerate Grace Fox, with nothing to suggest she wasn't guilty except his own desire -- even need -- to prove her innocence.
Edward Fox, by the few surviving accounts, was a stiff, cold doctor, years older than Grace, unempathetic to the discomforts of his patients and probably to his wife's preferences and sentiments, also.
Grace, by contrast, is described as a warm and passionately engaged woman who served as a nurse in Asia and Europe during the Second World War.
She cared about music -- a gift obviously important to Lowndes -- and at the time of her husband's death, when she was 40, she also cared for a local 19-year-old with whom she was having an affair.
Lowndes believes -- probably correctly -- local police, officials and jurors were so appalled by that extramarital dalliance they assumed her quite capable of murder, as well.
On the other hand, if Grace murdered her husband, she did it almost perfectly, with witnesses, during a multi-day snowstorm, to Edward's apparent heart attack from which, as a nurse, she tried to revive him. If not for a witness to her love affair with the local youth, she almost certainly wouldn't have even been suspected, much less convicted and hanged.
In his pursuit of what really happened, Lowndes travels to France and even South Africa to interview people, necessarily elderly, who knew Grace Fox in the 1950s. On the home front, he falls into a relationship with his married, then separated, real-estate agent, while still struggling with mourning his wife.
In the pages of her war-time journals that form portions of the novel and in the recountings of others, Grace Fox's experiences attain a fine vividness.
Until the novel's final pages, however, Lowndes himself is an oddly hollow creation, a character built out of the music he listens to, the spirits he drinks, the movies he favours, and the yearnings he talks about more than he shows.
In the end, what has compelled him to pursue Grace Fox so compulsively is clearer, but even a pro like Peter Robinson faces a big challenge when a 60-year-old mystery winds up being livelier than the characters or circumstances of the present.
BOOKS IN BRIEF
The Boy in the Suitcase
By Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
(Random House)
Danish co-authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis have a written a number of thrillers featuring Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse who is married and a mother of two small children. She has a flaw -- not being able to turn away someone who asks for help and she regularly leaves her family to fend for themselves while doing so. This makes her an unsympathetic and slightly ridiculous character -- and this new story, while suspenseful, is less than satisfying as a result. An estranged friend Karin asks Nina to take something out of a public locker in Copenhagen, and when Nina discovers a three-year old boy, naked and drugged, inside a suitcase, she panics. When she can't reach Karin, she goes on a search to discover the boy's identity, and once she realizes she is being hunted, to try and keep both of them out of danger. Good premise, stupid heroine.
Lassiter
By Paul Levine
(Random House)
Former trial lawyer-turned best-selling author Paul Levine (yes, another one!) has created another memorable Florida character with his tough Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter. In this tale, Lassiter is confronted by a beautiful young insurance investigator called Amy Larkin, as he wraps up another of his successful but low rent court cases. She shows him a photo from his past where he is drinking with her young sister Krista, 18 years earlier. Krista was a runaway teen turned into a porn actress by a sleazy porn king who is now one of Miami's most respected philanthropists. Larkin tweaks Jake's conscience, and he agrees to help Amy look for her. A sharp, sexy story with suspenseful twists and turns.
- Yvonne Crittenden, QMI Agency
