It’s rare that I find that a book by a new author grips me to any extent. After all, I’m used to thrillers and crime stories - I’ve even written a few myself - and familiarity does have a bit of an impact. I tend to try to make sure that I vary my reading, with some golden age stories, then modern, and every so often returning to my heroes: PG Wodehouse or Fred Forsyth.
I was thinking of these two only recently. Wodehouse is one of my favourite writers. I love the sparkling wit and ingenious plots he used. And similarly, in a totally different vein, Forsyth guided my own writing in ways I can only really start to appreciate now. And it was very sad recently to hear that he had died. The author of such classics as The Odessa File, The Day Of The Jackal, The Dogs Of War and The Fourth Protocol was so inventive with his plots that all of my generation was gripped with every new title.
In recent years there have been few to equal the quality of his output. There are a few, but they’re all too rare.
Which is why this book blew me away.
The basic concept is sort of out of The Manchurian Candidate. It begins with a bunch of children being dumped at a roadside in northern Maine in 1970. There’s no record of them being kidnapped, but they are all about seven years old, and the curious thing about them is that they have some form of amnesia. No amount of therapy seems to help them, and although the authorities work hard to try to discover who their parents are, there are no clues.
The story moves on. The children grow up. They are adopted, or go into foster care, and Ed Constance is taken in by a couple with no children. The book follows Ed as he goes through school, with occasional breakdowns, violence, and blackouts, but over time he seems to become more steady, and even makes his way to college. But there, on his first day, he meets one of the other children from the seven, and from that moment his life starts to spiral into disaster. Why is it that the mention of a certain line from the bible makes him blackout?
I won’t go further. The main thing is, the book is superbly well-written, with brilliant use of the landscape from Florida to Maine, a plot that grips and keeps you guessing, a great cast of characters, seamlessly blending the history of American fascism with more recent history (no, last century!) and enough action to keep Jason Bourne or Reacher exhausted.
Seriously, this is a book to buy, read, and then eagerly wait for a sequel. Highly recommended!
