Thriller set around Hanover (Lustmord* and more)

2nd August 2018

Night Driver by Marcelle Perks, thriller set around Hanover.

The author is clearly familiar with the landscape around Hanover and with the Autobahn network that supports out-of-town clubs where prostitution, drugs and nefarious undertakings are rife. This twilight milieu forms the backdrop to Night Driver.

I took this book to read whilst in Germany and felt the bleak landscape of the Autobahn network was well observed.

The printed book has nice touches, black and the white images of a street disappearing into the distance add to the darkness, and each page corner has a blurred image of a road, which remind the reader of motion and driving.

Frannie is nearly full term in her pregnancy, married to Kurt who has lost interest in her. With his escalating ambivalence she realises she needs to be able to drive so that she can source nappies and be generally mobile with a baby in tow. She only just passes her driving test and decides to hone her driving skills at night, whilst Kurt sleeps, as the roads are less populated. She nevertheless has a few scrapes. Are there any cars left unscathed in this part of Lower Saxony after she has been out, I wonder? Even with practise you still would not like to meet her on the road, and her husband Kurt really is not in favour of her driving, especially in her condition – and more pertinently, driving in his precious car.

Whilst she is still being taught, she has a very unnerving encounter with a lorry driver, who seems to take pleasure in aggressively tailgating her. The driver is Lars of whom we learn more, much more as the book unfolds. In cahoots with Hans, the reader is soon initiated into the darker side of Moonlights Club, a front for all kinds of businesses.

Off she sets one evening, in order to get more experience, but encounters a Polish man, a motorcyclist who happens to be looking for his sister.  He hasn’t heard from her in a while. All roads ultimately lead to….. Moonlights Club.

Throw into a pot a combination of sex, prostitution, organ harvesting, lorry driving, mass murder, drugs, human trafficking and a heavily pregnant protagonist who is a nervous driver (the night driver of the novel), give the pot a good shake and see what comes out, just like the spread of dice that fall away in a random fashion. The book is over-reliant on similes in order to enrich some of the descriptions. In essence there is too much ‘telling’ of the story and not enough ‘showing’ and thus the characters, pregnant Frannie, and Hans, the psychopath/sociopath (they tend fo fall from the same psychological tree), together with his partner Lars, who kills as “an act of love” all feel fairly two dimensional. Lars in particular is inspired by a serial killer from the 19th Century, who was dubbed the Butcher of Hanover. There is, however, little fleshing out of the personas, they are more manifestations of their conditions.

Frannie, as mentioned, is pregnant (a bold choice for a protagonist who hurtles around the countryside like a bat out of hell, risking life and limb) and even in the early stages of labour is dodging the perpetrators. She is not one to give up and she doggedly continues her quest to find the missing woman.

The author peppers the story with German words, to make the locale feel more immediate and real. The usual contenders appear like Schweinehund, Scheisse and so forth, and there is one point where Frannie’s driving instructor urges her to put her foot down (as Lars’s truck is thundering down on them from behind), Gehen, Gehen  exhorts her driving instructor, which means go go (but on foot. It maybe should have been los, los – go, go – or fahren, fahren – drive, drive). It might have been better if she had indeed got out of the car at that point and walked away on foot.

The style of writing is unusual. It may well be intentional to give the English just a foreign twang on occasion to underline that the action is set in Germany, but at times it can feel felt just a little odd. For me, for example, ‘the blood started to fall out’‘ of a wound sounded like bad translation – blood is liquid and therefore I might have anticipated a verb to reflect its nature

As you may have guessed I wasn’t too fazed by the subject matter but the construct and style just didn’t hang together  for me, and at times the storyline just got preposterous and felt oftentimes out of control, which I guess in many ways reflects Frannie’s situation. It is nevertheless a pacy read.

Tina for the TripFiction Team

* ‘the pleasure of murdering’

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