revenge
Home Sweet Murder
Best-selling author James Patterson admits that he is most inspired by real life, it being stranger than fiction. And he demonstrates that potential with the crimes reported in Home Sweet Murder which are 100% real, although certain elements of them have been fictionalised for narrative flow.
From the outset Patterson declares himself still haunted by the accounts in this book, and I can totally understand that – the attacks he details are truly barbaric, and turned the stomach of even the most experienced law-enforcement officers. A horrible reminder of the human capacity for unspeakable violence and depravity.
There are two stories told in this volume, both revolving around revenge for perceived wrongs.
In the first case, a senior lawyer and his wife, both in their sixties, are targetted in their own home. A man in a suit purporting to be an SEC agent, calls at their house one Sunday night, and interrogates Leo Fisher about irregularies in his legal firm. When Leo doesn’t reveal any incriminating information the intruder escalates the aggression, shooting, slashing, hitting, stabbing, kicking, until both his victims are close to death. He then pours gasoline around the house. But before he can light it, the office alarm is triggered and he flees with his accomplice – his wife. Despite his parlous state, Leo recognises the woman and is sufficiently aware to give the police a name, and one of his former employees, dismissed for rank incompetence and fraud, together with her husband, are apprehended. Though both Leo and Sue survive, the effect of the experience and their severe injuries leave indelible scars which will never heal. Even answering the doorbell is now an ordeal.
The second case involves a pathologist and university professor, William Hunter, and his eleven-year-old son, Tom. William arrives home one day to find his housekeeper lying lifeless in a pool of blood, and his son dead on the floor, both with kitchen knives sticking out of their necks. The wounds are eerily neat and precise; and what’s more, made by the Hunters’ own de-luxe kitchen knives. Who could possibly have the motive to kill a young child and a grandmother? A paedophile? A gamer? A monster? Who?
Five years pass, five long frustrating years for the police going over and over the evidence and the baffling apparent lack of motive. Detectives Mois and Negron are still searching when another doctor, Dr Brumback, a pathologist from the same university as Dr Hunter, and his wife, are murdered and left with their own kitchen knives protruding from their necks. On Mothers’ Day.
The focus is now on someone connected to the two doctors; someone with the skill to find specific veins and arteries in the neck, who might bear a grudge serious enough to kill. The team hunt through innumerable personnel files from the university. A former employee with a disastrous track record emerges as front-runner: Anthony Garcia had tried to sabotage a colleague’s medical exam; was rude, aggressive, professionally lax; had failed to gain a licence to practice; was fired (by Dr Hunter) and then denied a recommendation again and again (by both Drs Hunter and Brumback). But this is devastating news for Will Hunter himself. His beloved son, his housekeeper, his colleague, and his colleague’s wife have all been murdered because of his interactions with a disgruntled employee. But the net inexorably closes around Garcia, thankfully before he can cross the last two potential victims’ names off his hit list.
I was surprised to see how clumsy some of the prose was in places in the first half, but in spite of that, these stories are compelling reading. And especially chilling given that this is real life crime, not fiction. Patterson knows exactly what makes for a gripping tale and how to tell it.
Disclaimer
We’re deep in a situation of lockdown still and the stark reality of our world-wide war against Covid-19 has made most of our everyday preoccupations seem trivial. But it behoves us all to find strategies for keeping our mental as well as our physical heath as robust as we can. My first go-to respite activity is reading (no surprises there, huh?); getting lost in a whole other world, so I’m going to share my thoughts on a psychological thriller bought back in the (g)olden days when life was busy, and books accumulated waiting for time to read them. Those far off days when I was immersing myself in thrillers in order to learn the mechanics of writing in this genre. Before real life took over the role of sending shivers down our spines.
It’s Renée Knight‘s debut novel, Disclaimer.
How many people bother to read the small-print information at the beginning of a novel about publication, rights, cataloguing, typesetting and copyright? Very few, I’d guess. And those few, other writers and publishers probably. But in amongst all that boring detail you’ll find a disclaimer to the effect that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
What if, though, that disclaimer had a red line drawn through it? THAT would make you sit up and take notice, wouldn’t it? And so it is when award-winning documentary maker, Catherine Ravenscroft, finds a book on her bedside table with the disclaimer crossed out. With a chill of horror coursing through her veins, as she reads, she becomes increasingly aware that she herself is not only the foundation of the story, but the key player. The words ricochet around her brain, slam into her chest, one after another. The names may have been changed, but the details are unmistakable. And this story will reveal a secret she thought no one else knew; a secret she has carried unshared for two decades.
Who has written it? Who has delivered it? Who has sent a second copy to her only son, Nicholas? Who has spelled out her death – under the wheels of a train – the price she must pay for pretending that everything was absolutely fine. Her dread increases exponentially as the stalker closes in.
We, the readers, know the sender is an elderly English teacher, Stephen Brigstocke, who himself has something rather unsavoury in his history. After the death of his wife Nancy, he stumbles across a stash of erotic photographs, and a secret manuscript written by her – clues she left for him to find. Clues relating to the tragic death of their only son, Jonathan, who drowned in Spain trying to rescue a five year old boy, and to a terrible truth Nancy had concealed from her husband during her lifetime.
Desire for revenge consumes him. He publishes Nancy’s story, The Perfect Stranger, and hand delivers his grenade.
‘… the book was like a terrier, my Jack Russell of a novel which would sniff her from her hiding place and chase her out into the open. Its sharp, pointed teeth would expose her, strip away the counterfeit selves she’d assembled.’
But the wait for revenge is slow and protracted. Alternating chapters give us the feel for the cat and mouse game being played out by these two. Extracts from The Perfect Stranger paint a picture of what happened in that Spanish holiday resort all those years ago. But gradually, chillingly, we are made aware that nothing is what it seems; a far more terrible reality underpins the tale told by those incriminating photographs.
As expected the story twists and turns and we’re exposed to the worst aspects of the characters’ inner selves, none of whom are very likeable. But it’s cleverly designed, and I was intrigued by the author’s ability to slowly but inexorably turn the entire story on its head. Tightening the screw one more time right at the very end.
An unpredictable but intriguing diversion in these weirdly nightmarish days when the real world is spinning into an uncertain and unknowable future.