When Alison and her best friend Liz move from their hometown of Cork to go to university in Dublin they feel excited at the prospect of new and exciting opportunities. Shortly after starting her course Alison meets and falls in love with Will, a charismatic and charming fellow student, and they soon become inseparable. Although, as a result, her relationship with Liz becomes more strained, life couldn’t feel better now that she has such an attentive boyfriend. However, when five girls are murdered by someone dubbed the Canal Killer, no one is more shocked than Alison when Will confesses to the crimes and is imprisoned. Feeling shame that she had initially been so publically vociferous in her defence of him against the charges, Alison no longer feels able to live in Ireland and so moves to the Netherlands to make a new life for herself, in a place where she is not instantly recognised and where no one, not even her closest friends, know anything about her past.
However, ten years later her settled life is turned upside down when she is approached by two Garda detectives from Dublin who visit her at home and ask for her help. Another young girl has been pulled from the Grand Canal and, with the circumstances appearing to be identical to the earlier murders, the police wonder whether this is a copycat murder or whether Will is, in fact, innocent of the earlier crimes. Now held in a secure psychiatric hospital, he claims to have useful information which he is prepared to divulge, but only to Alison. Although reluctant to return to Ireland and confront the past she has tried so hard to put behind her, she feels obliged to do all she can to prevent any further murders.
With shifts between past and present, and from the points of view of Alison, Will and an unidentified third party, the mystery behind the killings is gradually unfolded. Alison works alongside two detectives – Jerry Shaw who obtained the original confession from Will and still believes him to be guilty, and Michael Malone who has some doubts about the first investigation. When she meets Will again Alison is brought face to face not only with all her doubts and her feelings of shame and guilt, but also with the realisation that what happened in the past has ensured that neither she nor Will has been free to live the life they should have had.
I found this a reasonably engaging novel, although I think the pacing was initially rather slow. I enjoyed the switches between past and present and think these were managed in a very effective way, increasingly ratcheting up the tension of the story-telling. I found Alison a more convincing character than Will, but maybe that was because hers was the main voice in the narrative. I think that the details of police procedures and interrogation techniques during the initial investigations lent a powerful intensity and credibility to the circumstances leading up to Will’s original confession. However, the autonomy of Alison’s involvement in the current investigation and into Will’s protestations of innocence, as well as her developing relationship with Michael Malone, required a certain suspension of disbelief – even though this was quite entertaining!
There were several twists and turns as the story progressed, although perhaps not quite as many psychological complexities as I would have liked, hence my three, rather than four, star-rating. I think that the final twist was quite a clever one, particularly as, in some ways, it encapsulated a theme which ran throughout the story. This was one which explored, in both past and present accounts, how misunderstandings and miscommunications can skew the outcome not only of a murder investigation, but also of relationships in general. This theme, in addition to the one which demonstrated that we can never fully escape our pasts, were the driving forces of this book for me and are probably enough to tempt me to read the author’s award-winning debut novel, Distress Signals.
However, ten years later her settled life is turned upside down when she is approached by two Garda detectives from Dublin who visit her at home and ask for her help. Another young girl has been pulled from the Grand Canal and, with the circumstances appearing to be identical to the earlier murders, the police wonder whether this is a copycat murder or whether Will is, in fact, innocent of the earlier crimes. Now held in a secure psychiatric hospital, he claims to have useful information which he is prepared to divulge, but only to Alison. Although reluctant to return to Ireland and confront the past she has tried so hard to put behind her, she feels obliged to do all she can to prevent any further murders.
With shifts between past and present, and from the points of view of Alison, Will and an unidentified third party, the mystery behind the killings is gradually unfolded. Alison works alongside two detectives – Jerry Shaw who obtained the original confession from Will and still believes him to be guilty, and Michael Malone who has some doubts about the first investigation. When she meets Will again Alison is brought face to face not only with all her doubts and her feelings of shame and guilt, but also with the realisation that what happened in the past has ensured that neither she nor Will has been free to live the life they should have had.
I found this a reasonably engaging novel, although I think the pacing was initially rather slow. I enjoyed the switches between past and present and think these were managed in a very effective way, increasingly ratcheting up the tension of the story-telling. I found Alison a more convincing character than Will, but maybe that was because hers was the main voice in the narrative. I think that the details of police procedures and interrogation techniques during the initial investigations lent a powerful intensity and credibility to the circumstances leading up to Will’s original confession. However, the autonomy of Alison’s involvement in the current investigation and into Will’s protestations of innocence, as well as her developing relationship with Michael Malone, required a certain suspension of disbelief – even though this was quite entertaining!
There were several twists and turns as the story progressed, although perhaps not quite as many psychological complexities as I would have liked, hence my three, rather than four, star-rating. I think that the final twist was quite a clever one, particularly as, in some ways, it encapsulated a theme which ran throughout the story. This was one which explored, in both past and present accounts, how misunderstandings and miscommunications can skew the outcome not only of a murder investigation, but also of relationships in general. This theme, in addition to the one which demonstrated that we can never fully escape our pasts, were the driving forces of this book for me and are probably enough to tempt me to read the author’s award-winning debut novel, Distress Signals.