Review of Broadchurch by Erin Kelly

Broadchurch by Erin Kelly, based on the story by series creator Chris Chibnall

Back a couple of years ago, I read about a psychology study claiming that people who had been "spoiled"––meaning that they'd learned major plot points in advance––actually enjoyed a book or movie more than those who hadn't. I think that knowing a story in advance can add another layer to the experience; if you know what's going to happen, you may have a more nuanced experience when you see a movie or read a book.

That's why I was interested in reading Broadchurch (Minotaur Books, September 2, 2014), even though I'd watched the Broadchurch series already, on BBC America. (I wrote about the series at length here.) I had David Tennant, Olivia Coleman and Jodie Whittaker in my head whenever Alec Hardy, Ellie Miller and Beth Latimer appeared in the book, and that brought them even more vividly to life. And the novelization allows the reader to know the characters' thoughts (to some extent) and provides a closer look at why some characters do what they do.

West Bay beach, Dorset, filming scene for the Broadchurch series

Author Erin Kelly has written five novels, psychological thrillers, including the recent The Burning Air (see review here) and The Ties that Bind. She has a lean writing style, but with a richness and skill at conveying emotions that works very well in adapting the story written for the screen by Chris Chibnall. The murder of 11-year-old Danny Latimer in the small Dorset beach town of Broadchurch makes friends and neighbors begin suspecting each other and questioning whether they could have prevented Danny's death. This is an excellent setup for the kind of psychological drama that is Kelly's specialty.

Chloe, Mark and Beth Latimer, grandmother Liz

Danny's murder is devastating to his young parents, Beth and Mark, who married when they were teenagers; his older sister, Chloe; and his grandmother. They don't know what to do with the rage that boils inside them, the grief that follows them from room to room and crowds them when they sit on the sofa. Beth, an avid runner, particularly feels the claustrophobia of feeling penned inside the house, but when she rushes to the grocery story to escape, the reactions of the other shoppers make her want to run them down with her cart.

Mark has a secret about where he was when Danny was killed, and the way life works in a small town, he hangs onto it even when it means he falls under suspicion, not just from the police, but even Beth.

DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant), DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Coleman)

And there is more drama with the investigators and journalists. Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller is not only longtime friends with the Latimers, with her son having been best friends with Danny, but Ellie is forced to partner with new-to-town Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who has been slotted into the job that she'd been assured was going to be given to her. Alec Hardy is terse, seems to think everybody in Broadchurch is an idiot, and is battling personal demons. Hardy and Miller begin as nothing but rough edges to each other, but the friction begins to rub away the edges as they desperately work to keep the investigation on track, despite an increasingly fractious local population and the jackals of the press.

Maggie, Olly and Karen

Olly Stevens, Ellie's young nephew, is a fledgling journalist with the local paper, run by the tough-but-tender veteran, Maggie. Olly hopes to break into the big time, like Karen White, a brash reporter for a big national daily paper, who finds it difficult to reconcile the demands of her editor for tabloid-style stories with the sympathies she increasingly has for the Broadchurch locals. Karen knows Hardy from an earlier case in another town, and they are bitterly at odds.

Along with being an excellent psychological thriller and whodunnit, the story is a rich portrait of small-town life in this beach community on the Dorset coast. You don't often come across crime fiction that takes so seriously the effect of murder on a community. The story races along, with plenty of action, tension and emotion. If you prefer fairly short books, don't be put off by the book's 433 pages. It's a fast read, both because of its pace and the fairly large type.

Anna Gunn will play Ellie Miller in Gracepoint

You might have heard that Fox will be broadcasting a 10-part remake of Broadchurch, called Gracepoint, starting October 2. Despite what I said earlier about having no problem watching/reading after being spoiled, I'm not so sure about Gracepoint. I just watched all the videos on Fox's site and it looks like a pale imitation of Broadchurch. So many scenes have almost exactly the same direction and dialog, but the actors (except for David Tennant, who reprises his role––I guess he's that anxious to become better known in the US) have that buffed and homogenized look that American producers think we want, rather than the very real-looking actors that the British readily cast. From the videos, it appears that looks have been elevated over acting skills, compared to the British cast, at least in some cases. (I'm not talking about Anna Gunn's acting, but just look at some of the other actors' videos.)

I would strongly recommend watching Broadchurch (available on Amazon Instant Video and Netflix)––and reading this book––and then deciding whether you want to see Gracepoint. And look for the second season of Broadchurch, which is being filmed now in the UK and will air on BBC America sometime early in 2015.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of the book for review. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Fall Preview 2014: Part Six

Veronica Mars, my favorite young detective, has been around a lot in 2014, first in a movie and then in The Thousand Dollar Tan Line novel. (I wrote about the movie and the book here.) She'll be back soon, in Rob Thomas's second Veronica Mars novel, Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage, October 28).

Those of us who watched the Veronica Mars series know the Neptune Grand hotel very well. For the fanciest spot in town, it's sure been the scene of plenty of low-down deeds, and now we have another. A woman comes forward, claiming that months earlier she had been assaulted in one of the Neptune Grand's rooms and left for dead. Management asks Veronica to investigate, before a full-blown scandal can harm the hotel's business.

Veronica's client is a headache, refusing to turn over its reservations list, and the accuser is no better, with her refusal to say who she was meeting that night and her inability to identify her attacker. The hotel's security system turns out to be no help, either, all of which leaves Veronica with a real investigative challenge on her hands.

Of course, the book is on my to-read list. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to the September 15 debut of the web series Play It Again, Dick, a very metafictional and crazy-sounding story, in which Ryan Hansen, who played the inimitable Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars, tries to cash in on the Veronica Mars movie buzz by getting the other cast members to make a spinoff with him.

Jonathan Kellerman and his son, Jesse, are collaborating on a new series featuring LAPD detective Jacob Lev. In The Golem of Hollywood (Putnam, September 16), Jacob had been working out of Hollywood Division, Robbery-Homicide. Jacob had a good record, until he didn't. He seems to be suffering from depression, though Captain Mendoza, who really doesn't like him, calls it a lot of other names and wants to get rid of him.

Now Jacob is on some "Special Projects" squad he never heard of, assigned to investigate a bizarre murder. Up in the Hollywood Hills, a murder victim is found––only it's not the entire victim, just a head. And the Hebrew word for "justice" is burned into the kitchen counter.

Jacob is in for a long, strange trip with this investigation, from Los Angeles, around the country and even overseas, to London and Prague, the home of the original Golem of Prague. You can read the first three chapters of the book at Jonathan Kellerman's website here.

Last summer, I stayed up until 3:00am reading Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale––and trust me, unlike Georgette, I'm no night owl! Naturally, I pricked up my ears when I heard he has a new book coming out: First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (Viking, October 20). Lovett continues his propensity to meld an old-book treasure hunt with a contemporary personal story.

Sophie Collingwood is the bibliomaniac this time around. She inherited her passion from her Uncle Bertram, and is crushed when, at his death, his books have to be sold to pay his outstanding debts. Sophie takes a job selling old books herself, and ends up on the trail of a book by clergyman Richard Mansfield, which may have been the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice, written by Mansfield's friend, Jane Austen.

Sophie's quest to determine whether Austen copied from Mansfield expands to include her efforts to satisfy her suspicions about her uncle's death. She also has to deal with two men competing for her affections; an American scholar and an English publisher.

Kirkus Reviews says this new book isn't nearly as fresh as The Bookman's Tale, and that Sophie's story "verg[es] on chick lit," while the Austen portions "test the patience of non-Austenophiles." This doesn't entirely put me off; it just makes me think this one might not keep me up reading past my bedtime.

Did you ever see that terrific 1971 Michael Caine flick, Get Carter? I did, and loved it. I didn't realize that the story came from Ted Lewis's 1970 book, Jack's Return Home. Soho Syndicate is republishing Lewis's book, under the title Get Carter on September 9, and I want to remedy my sin of reading omission.

Yorkshireman Jack Carter left the north of England and moved to London, where he became a mob enforcer. Eight years later, Jack's brother, Frank, is killed in a supposed car accident. Even though Jack hadn't spoken to Frank in years, he returns home and investigates to discover the truth about Frank's death, despite increasingly more pointed and then violent urgings that he stay out of the business of the local villains and return to the south.

Publishers Weekly raves about the book's "evocative prose" and Lewis's talent at "inject[ing] humor into the mostly gritty proceedings." PW also says that Ian Rankin fans who don't know Ted Lewis will be pleased with the story. If you enjoy the book, you should also try to find the two Jack Carter prequels Ted Lewis wrote, Jack Carter's Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

Helen Giltrow's debut novel, The Distance (Doubleday, September 9) promises a modern, hard-edged thriller begging to be turned into an action-packed film. On the surface, Charlotte Alton is a cool, smooth, sophisticated young Londoner. But she has another identity, Karla, an expert in making information vanish.

One of the criminals whom Karla has helped disappear is Simon Johanssen, a military sniper who parlayed his skills into a second career as a hit man, and who needed a complete identity alteration when a mob hit he'd been hired to do went wrong. Simon comes to Karla to ask her to team up with him on a new job he has, to take out a prisoner in "The Program," an ultra-high-security prison in London that is an operational experiment, in that the prisoners essentially run their own community.

Karla's job is to set up an identity that will get Simon inside The Program and get him out when the job is done. But when she finds that his target doesn't seem to have any paper-trail existence, she becomes suspicious and feels compelled to find out who the target is and the reasons behind Simon's hire. To add extra tension to the plot, the mobster who has it in for Simon because of the botched hit just happens to be a current resident of The Program. Word is that this is an intense, dark, plot-driven thriller that will keep your mind racing trying to figure out what will happen next.

Another London-based page-turner coming out the same day as The Distance is Oliver Harris's Deep Shelter (Harper/Bourbon Street, September 9). This is the second entry in the DC Nick Belsey series, that began with The Hollow Man. Belsey is one of those cops who finds ethics a luxury beyond his budget, working in a city full of every temptation and every kind of corruption.

Bad-boy Belsey decides to impress his date, Jemma, by taking her to an abandoned World War II bomb shelter where he'd earlier found a store of drink and drugs. When she seemingly disappears into thin air, Belsey knows he must find her himself, and pronto, since otherwise he'll be the prime suspect in her missing-person case, or whatever worse kind of case it might turn into.

Belsey is convinced that the secret to Jemma's disappearance lies in the network of underground tunnels that hold secrets from decades past. As he searches, he begins to receive messages from Jemma's kidnapper, who is using the name Ferryman, which was the moniker of a famous spy during the Cold War. Time is running out as Belsey tries to figure out who Ferryman really is, rescue Jemma and avoid getting caught by his own police force. I need to get a copy of The Hollow Man read ASAP so that I'll be ready for Deep Shelter.

I can't exactly say I'm looking forward to Robert Baer's The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins (Penguin/Blue Rider, October 28); that seems wrong, given the subject, but I'm intrigued. Baer spent 25 years as a CIA operative and assassin (though he claims he never succeeded in taking out a target).

In this wry, hard-eyed guide (hmm, do I really want to call something on this subject a guide?), Baer examines the history of political assassination, making the point that this tactic works better in combating evil than, say, drone strikes. Baer is the author of the best seller, See No Evil, which was adapted for the film Syriana, where his character was played by George Clooney. (Now there's an item for any man's bucket list!) Earlier this summer, it was announced that The Perfect Kill has already been optioned for a cable TV series.

I was lucky enough to receive an advance reviewing copy of Broadchurch (Minotaur, September 2), by Erin Kelly, from Chris Chibnall's screenplay for the popular television miniseries. I'll be writing about the book at length next week, but for now I want to let you know that this was a gripping novel that can stand on its own or be enjoyed even if you already watched the miniseries.

Broadchurch is a small beach town on the Dorset coast, where everybody knows everybody else. When 11-year-old Danny Latimer is found murdered on the beachfront, it turns everyone's lives upside down. Ellie Miller's family is close to the Latimers, but Ellie is a cop and she is constantly reminded by her acerbic new boss, DI Alec Hardy, that she must stay in that role and remember that nobody can be trusted.

Mark Latimer, Danny's father, has a secret that he refuses to tell, and soon even his wife, Beth, begins to suspect that he has a role in Danny's death. Neighbors begin to suspect each other, and secrets are brought to light that may ruin lives. A fascinating whodunnit, Broadchurch is also a thoughtful study of how murder affects a community.

Lucy Worsley is a new name to me, but she's a well-known historian in England, where history is all-important. At only 40 years old, Worsley is chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces organization, and she regularly hosts history-related television series.

One of Worsley's interests is social history, and it looks like anything goes with her. Later this year, she's pairing up with Len Goodman, of Dancing With the Stars in the US and Strictly Come Dancing in the UK, to present a new BBC4 series called Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance. The series studies the social history of popular dances, and at the end of each episode, Goodman and Worsley suit up in period costume and demonstrate a dance.

Worsley has also turned her attention to England's longtime fascination with murder, from Jack the Ripper to the Ratcliff Highway Murders to Dr. Crippen and, in fiction, from Sherlock Holmes, through the Golden Age to today. In The Art of English Murder (Pegasus Crime, October 8), Worsley examines just what it is that makes murder a near-obsession and an entertainment in England. Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review and says: "Worsley's vivid account excites as much as its sensational subject matter, and edifies too, thanks to her learned explications."

We'll be back next week with even more previews of coming attractions.

Review of Erin Kelly's The Burning Air

The Burning Air by Erin Kelly

The mother-child relationship can generate a lot of heat. Think about how Psycho's Norma Bates emotionally crippled her son Norman (Anthony Perkins), and then she, Norman, and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) pay the price. Recall the havoc caused by the relationship between Stephen King's monstrously abusive Margaret and her telekinetic daughter Carrie. But even the most loving and well-meaning of mothers can plant the seeds of their children's ruin. Take the Greek goddess Thetis, who loved her son Achilles and tried to give him immortality by dipping him in the river Styx, but left him vulnerable because she'd held him by his heel. There's no denying that the bond between mothers and their children can make the children stronger or destroy them.

In her third novel, The Burning Air, Erin Kelly enthralls us with the unintended, devastating consequences of mothers' relationships with their children. That combustible familial bond—as well as class, identity, obsession, psychosis, and vengeance—is portrayed with the intensity and aching sense of loss we expect from Ruth Rendell, Kate Atkinson, or Tana French. This book is as suspenseful as Kelly's previous fiction, The Poison Tree and The Dark Rose (also published as The Sick Rose), yet it tells a more complex story.

As The Burning Air begins in January 2013, Saxby matriarch and court magistrate Lydia MacBride has terminal cancer. She has obsessively kept a diary her whole life, and she now feels compelled to record her confession of an act that took place years ago. It's unthinkable, however, that any eyes other than her own would see it. As Lydia writes, "Reputation is one thing; family is quite another. Family matters." And it was love for her children, love for her son, that caused her to act wrongly as she did.

The book leaps to November 2013, nine months after Lydia's death. The plan is to gather for a MacBride family healing. Lydia's husband Rowan and their three adult children—Sophie, Tara, and Felix—will assemble at the MacBrides' country vacation home, Far Barn, in Devon; participate in the village celebration of Fire Night, as traditional; and scatter Lydia's ashes.

An omniscient narrator describes the arrival of Sophie, who gave birth to Edie on the day of her mother's death, her husband Will, and their four children. The writing is gorgeous and full of foreboding, as "the hedgerows themselves seemed to squeeze their oversized car along the road like a clot through a vein," and "branches jabbed witchy fingers through the windows" before they spot the barn, "a black mass on a cloud-blind night." Once inside, the rich reds of the barn's upholstered furniture, rugs, and tapestries give one "the impression of standing in the belly of a great beast." The acoustics of the barn are strange, and there is no nearby cell-phone reception.

The atmospherics of the family's arrival and the barn aren't the only evening's premonition of the trouble to come. Rowan, retired headmaster of Saxby's elite Cathedral School, is already there, inexplicably drunk. Tara soon confides that Jake, her 14-year-old mixed-race son from a teenage relationship, has been in serious trouble. Tara and her lover, Matt, notice tensions between Sophie and her husband Will. Twenty-nine year old Felix, a disfigured furniture-restorer who lives "entirely ironically," unsettles his family by arriving with his first-ever girlfriend, a ravishingly beautiful woman named Kerry, who barely speaks.

As the day of Fire Night unfolds, attention centers on baby Edie, the "beating heart of the family." Her family adores her; cousin Jake wants to feed her; Kerry is entranced by her. This creates sparks of friction, as Sophie is overwhelmed by feelings of jealousy and protectiveness toward Edie, but she's pulled in many directions. She discovers an old sweater of her mother Lydia's, and instinctively holds it to her nose and inhales. "The rush back through time, to their house in Cathedral terrace, was so swift that Sophie half expected to feel her hair flying." She must pay attention to her husband and sons, too.

Thus does Sophie unintentionally set the stage for Lydia's close-knit MacBrides—three generations of upper-class privilege—to harvest the seeds sown by Lydia and another well-meaning mother with her own secrets, whom we meet in an extended flashback through her child's narration. Author Kelly peers into that narrator's head and illuminates the symbiotic mother-child dynamic like a psychiatrist presenting an interesting case study, but with a twist that shocks the audience. Other characters and the multiple narrative voices are also well done. Even though the ending's structure somewhat deflects the arc of suspense, I liked its kaleidoscopic nature.

The Burning Air is entertaining and evocative, character-driven suspense, about the dangerous nature of mother love. Its flame can burn like hell.

Note: I received a free digital galley of Erin Kelly's The Burning Air, published earlier this year, by Viking/Penguin Group (USA).