When five spooked horses from the Royal Household Cavalry threw their riders and bolted through the streets of central London last month, it was a reminder that although England is an ancient and highly developed civilization, a primal wildness always courses beneath its polite veneer. The fallout from such escapes is the subject of Philip Miller’s The Hollow Tree, where the gloom and brutality of centuries past hang heavy.
Shona Sandison, the irascible Edinburgh journalist from Miller’s elegantly noir-ish The Goldenacre, returns here, to attend the wedding of a friend from the newspaper where she once worked. She’s now a “churnalist,” cranking out copy for an agency that specializes in investigative pieces, one of her few options in a world where newspapers are disappearing.
Her new career and her father’s ill health have not improved her mood when she witnesses one of her fellow guests leap to his death from the roof of the wedding hotel. Setting aside the shock of it, she smells a story in the man’s strange tattoos and the odd phrases he was muttering before he jumped. She learns that he was part of a tight group of friends from high school bound together by the unsolved disappearance of one of them as a teenager, and possibly something more.
Miller plunges us—and urban creature Shona, who is disabled and walks with a cane—deep into the murk of Ullathorne, a vestige of Olde England in the north, where the very stones have meaning and overgrown ruins hide dark deeds. He contrasts this neglected Eden with the rise of a jacked-up, borderline-fascist politician who was part of the student group and is strongly invested in keeping the past buried and the future purely Anglo-Saxon.
Like the art-world corruption in The Goldenacre, the far-right, immigrant-baiting nature of regional English politics gives The Hollow Tree a real-world grounding. This is helpful in a book that touches on the occult in the form of a bossy Ouija board, and wants us to believe in the politician’s ability to elude public discovery despite his insanely reckless private life. But Miller is a melancholy master of atmosphere as well as a poet who knows how to cast a spell, so a slight suspension of disbelief has its benefits.
The gloom and brutality of centuries past hang heavy in Philip Miller’s The Hollow Tree.
The dying habit of newspaper reading that almost derailed Shona Sandison’s career lives on in Edwin Fitzgerald, the 84-year-old private detective in Elly Griffiths’s The Last Word. The title refers, at least partially, to obituaries, which Edwin can’t help reading—he gets his best clues from them as well as a kind of relief that he’s still alive.
The ease of Griffiths’s writing and her droll humor mean that there is much to enjoy here, starting with the partners in England’s most unlikely detective agency, K and F. The K is for the beautiful and entrepreneurial Ukrainian Natalka Kolisnyk, and F is for Edwin, who worked at BBC Radio 3 as a classical-music host.
Though the pragmatic, numbers-oriented Natalka doesn’t have much in common with the more culturally minded Edwin, they complement each other neatly, surveilling cheating husbands until a potential murder case falls in their lap. The daughters of a romance novelist suspect that their 70-year-old mother did not die of a heart attack, the official cause of death, but was poisoned by her much younger boyfriend. When another sketchy death, similar to the novelist’s, is brought to their notice, Edwin discovers a link to a writers’ retreat that both victims attended.
It’s their best lead, so Edwin and Natalka’s boyfriend, an ex-monk named Benedict who’s a frustrated crime-fiction writer, go undercover to the intimidating retreat. What happens there not only confirms Edwin’s suspicions but doubles down on them.
In The Last Word, Griffiths breezily holds her own with Richard Osman and other top-notch murder-club writers. Somehow, she manages to make light but meaningful work of heavy subjects like the war in Ukraine, lapsed religion, racism, and, of course, murder. Her characters couldn’t be more charming because they don’t try to be, and their sleuthing draws from their communal knowledge of everything from Puccini’s Tosca to the poetry of A. E. Housman.
When Edwin and Benedict are reading obituaries together, they come across a former colleague of Edwin’s who died at 85. “That’s no age,” Benedict says when he sees his friend’s face fall. Let’s hope it isn’t, and that Edwin continues to defy his years for the foreseeable future.
In The Last Word, Elly Griffiths breezily holds her own with Richard Osman and other top-notch murder-club writers.
While Griffiths touches on dark subjects, her tone is essentially warm and optimistic. In The Return of Ellie Black, about a teenage girl abducted and held captive for two years, Emiko Jean looks straight into the black souls of a twisted few.
However—and this is what makes this book stand out in the “taken girls” genre—Jean’s focus is not primarily on the nightmare of Ellie Black’s imprisonment, but what happens after she returns home. Most of these stories end with a rush of relief, the joy of reunion with family, the path to recovery. Not this one, where the end is just the beginning.
The long-missing Ellie is found wandering on a road outside a forest in Washington State and returned to her family after some cursory questioning and a medical exam. She was a wild teen when she was abducted, held in a remote forest encampment by two male captors along with a few other young women. The men renamed them, stripped them of their sense of self. The youngest girl, only a child, brought out a maternal instinct Ellie didn’t know she had.
She reveals little of this to the authorities or her family. Once at home, she retreats into herself, doesn’t shower or cut her hair, sleeps in a crawl space, and barely speaks, especially not to the police. One of the detectives, Chelsey Calhoun, is a young woman of Japanese descent whose career choice was influenced by the presumed murder of her adored sister at the hand of her boyfriend. So Chelsey is on a mission to rescue the remaining girls and bring Ellie’s captors to justice. But Ellie wants none of it.
Is this Stockholm Syndrome, or is Ellie simply damaged beyond repair? Chelsey’s suspicions increase as she notices that Ellie shows no signs of physical abuse—nor does she have a clear story about her escape.
Jean’s fresh approach upends expectations as the story unfolds from both Chelsey’s and Ellie’s points of view, revealing the ordeals that have shaped them. Jean’s experience as a young adult novelist makes her psychological insight into these troubled young women especially acute. Add to that a plot that takes a number of agile and surprising swoops toward the end and we have a strong new voice in the mournful choir that defines this genre.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City
