Lead Review

  • Book: The Quiet People
  • Location: Christchurch
  • Author: Paul Cleave

Review Author: Tina Hartas

Location

Content

Cameron and Lisa Murdoch are a writing husband and wife team, who pen murder mysteries together and create their own fictional worlds. In real life, as the novel opens, their son Zach goes missing. Cameron is at a local fair with Zach, he loses sight of his son on a bouncy castle but with agility and determination (knocking several people flying in his endeavours) he leaps onto the wobbling edifice to track him down

He finds him and they return home, flustered and overwrought. But by next morning the 7 year old has gone missing again, and this time it’s truly serious.

The author weaves around various possible hypotheses, as the hours become days and the boy still remains missing. Has he been abducted – an adult’s shoe print outside the child’s window might be an indicator? Might the couple, who are clearly adept at creating tantalising scenarios in their novels, be responsible for his disappearance? Perhaps they wanted rid of him because their popularity as authors appears to be waning, do they perhaps need the publicity to rekindle book sales? After all they of course know what they are doing when it comes to crime! When you think you know where the story is headed, the author tantalisingly wrong-foots the reader.

He captures the pain of having a child go missing, he portrays the raw emotions and convincingly depicts the weight that descends on a couple relationship, when there is such trauma. The cracks in the families involved soon start to show.

For the reader, it takes a moment at the opening of each chapter to understand which character is observing the unfolding narrative and their part in the plot-building. This gives the novel a kind of filmic quality as the story moves around and develops. It is also a novel that doesn’t lose the reader because the author is adept at presenting the clues in an ordered and readable way, whilst naturally throwing in a few curveballs. It has a very smooth trajectory.

This is a really easy to digest story and has really well plotted pace and rhythm.

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