Most helpful customer reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"Katherine Carr's name was as lovely as her fate was grim", Jun 24 2009
Three different stories fold over one another in this gothic mystery which revolves around the self-obsessive voice of a highly self-conscious, introspective former travel writer who laments the loss of his murdered son who had gone missing seven years before. Wracked with grief there is little that George Gates can do after eight-year-old Teddy was brutally killed one afternoon while waiting for his father to collect him after school. His body was eventually discovered, weighted with stones and suck to the muddy bottom of the Winthrop River. Suddenly the world for George has dropped away, the days falling endlessly, the grieving father desperate for revenge. Even as George remembers Teddy, the slow burn of his lost life, the killer never found, he narrates his tale to an enigmatic Indian man, Mr. Mayawati. Like a spider spinning the first delicate fiber of its web, George recounts his friendship with Arlo McBride, a retired cop and a strange kind of mystery about a missing person, he cannot get off his mind, a thirty one -year-old woman named Catherine Carr, last seen standing near a little rock grotto over the Winthrop River back on 1987.
Katherine was a writer like George only she only wrote poems - published stuff in little literary magazines - but she had just vanished "like she cut a slit on the world and stepped through it." Held captive by his dark turn of mind and constantly tormented dreams of Teddy's capture, George never stops harboring the notion that the man who'd killed his son would one day walk into his sites and discovering the strange fate of Katherine Carr, he can perhaps assuage his own feelings towards the death his Teddy. Positive that Arlo had missed a vital clue and mislaid a critical piece of information, he obtains from Katherine's friend Audrey the opening chapters of a story Catherine wrote, and a few poems.
Strangely it is George's friendship with a dying twelve-year-old girl, Alice Barrows who has progeria, premature aging, that helps in unlock the cryptic beginnings of Katherine's story. Alice is a very bright girl, possessed of a tremendous curiosity, but she doesn't have much time left. Even as she faces the hopelessness of her situation with a profound stoicism, fanatically tapping away on her laptop computer, George connects Alice to his lost boy, with the glimmer of a smile, the arch of an eyebrow, a twelve year old girl who looks like an old woman and that of the disappearance of Katherine.
Even now, in his solitary state, the world impinges on George along with Katherine's story and a mysterious figure called Maldrow and an "unknown man," Catherine enters her own story as a character. Whether based on herself or not, she's forever doomed prey. A story with its flickering horrors and talk of blood, and a girl whose own dark fate was approaching quickly, the character of Maldrow becomes only half-visible, "his features cloudy and indistinct, a character that Katherine has inexplicably rendered too insubstantially.
As George continues to fulfill his promise to Alice, two amateur sleuths following the trail of an elusive mystery, Cook writes of Katherine's literary fate in oddly haunting circumstances. This novel has all the hallmarks of 40's noir where symbolic images abound: figures in shadowy corners, a mist filled river bank, the stone grotto by the river where Katherine had been seen last, ghostly walkways, and spectral apparitions of evil murderers. Harrison digs into the darkest corners of the human psyche, the murky world of missing things and how sad it is - the unresolved, and how crowded life is with unsolved mysteries like the murder of a little boy, or the whereabouts of an unknown woman.
This tale is far from cheerful but nonetheless compelling. The lives of Alice and Katherine becoming a product of some terrible confluence of events, something cruelly embedded in the scheme of things. Still the essential dilemma remains of what had happened to Katherine, if she didn't kill herself or wasn't murdered, why did she vanish? And was her story a desperate note a plea for someone to save her? Adding to the emotional impact of the story is George's dilemma, the loneliness, displacement and his overwhelming sadness, the memories of Teddy's murder forcing him to lead a life in a kind of no-man's-land between constant dread and sudden panic. Mike Leonard June 09.
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by Michael Connelly
by Kate Atkinson
by Zoe Heller
by Kate Atkinson
by Gillian Flynn
