Alice Feeney is a terrific writer of stand-alone thrillers. Some of her books I love more than others, but I have found her work to be consistently excellent across multiple novels, and through shifts in form and genre. There are aspects that trouble certain readers, unlikable characters in particular, that don’t bother me. At times the coincidences pile up alarmingly, and the endings are weaker than the beginnings, which is true of many thrillers.
I’m willing to look past that because she does three things exceptionally well: narration, suspense, and setting. Her first-person narrators are believable, her plots are twisty, and the places she writes about are infused with atmosphere.
Beautiful Ugly is her newest work and might be my favourite. The main character is an author battling insomnia and writer’s block, in the wake of his wife’s disappearance a year earlier. Grady Green receives the keys to a Scottish cabin from his agent, who’s eager for him to start a new book. Since he already used up the advance for his two-book contract, there’s a degree of urgency.
But he can’t sleep. He’s spent all of his money. His only friend is his dog, and he’s drinking too much Scotch. And his agent happens to be the godmother of his missing wife, Alice, an investigative journalist who was on the phone with Grady when she was apparently abducted. A creepy doll left behind in the car may be linked to her disappearance.
The cabin he’s been offered for a few months was the former writing spot of a famous author, now deceased, who left it to his agent. It’s on an island, pop. 25, inaccessible except by a creaky ferry that doesn’t seem seaworthy. Outsiders aren’t allowed to bring vehicles onto the island, which leaves Grady stranded in a remote spot.
The locals aren’t unfriendly, exactly, but they are odd. They may also be connected to people who have experienced devastating losses, people who Grady’s wife catalogued in her newspaper stories. These stories are being dropped off at his home in mysterious circumstances, doled out as clues.
Most intriguingly to the sleepless and potentially hallucinating Grady, he keeps catching glimpses of a woman who looks like his wife. I haven’t finished the novel, and several reviews suggest the book falls apart at the end, as did at least one of her previous works.
[Oh, I like this ending! But I can see why readers are objecting to it, and it’s pretty bleak in some ways.]
I was grumpy about her last book, Daisy Darker, complaining that it was “the weakest of Feeney’s books so far” despite the fact that the “setting is characteristically rich and evocative: a remote and decaying Victorian mansion, cut off by the sea overnight, where a family gathers to celebrate a birthday–and then begin dying.” So Feeney is repeating herself, a bit, with the Christie island trope.
No matter. This is a lot of fun, and as I plan a trip to Scotland, it’s fodder for thought as I contemplate Islay and Jura. Or the outer Hebrides, or the inner Hebrides. Or, courtesy of a Globe & Mail article, the Faroe Islands. The journey to an island is always wonderful.
And often expensive. I’m horrified by what it’s going to cost me to get from Nova Scotia to Argentia in NL, and then on to Gander. But I’m pitching a story about Americans watching Come from Away in the midst of (hand waving) all this, and someone seems interested. The challenge will be pinning people down for interviews about Canada-U.S. relations, when they really just want to enjoy a musical.
I love Come from Away. I’ve seen it three times and in three provinces. It’s not brilliant, musically, but it’s almost perfect as an emotional experience.
Back to Scotland, however. I’ve started reading the forthcoming Death on a Scottish Train by Lucy Connelly, titled Murder on a Scottish Train in my Netgalley preview copy. It’s a lot of fun as well, the fourth in the author’s Scottish Isle sequence which feels written for tourists like me. I imagine anyone in Scotland would scoff; this is not Val McDermid, or Louise Welsh.
The protagonist is an American doctor who’s relocated to a small town, Sea Isle, Scotland. She alternates between solving rather gentle mysteries and spending evenings on her couch reading them. In this outing, a refurbished train will connect Sea Isle to Edinburgh, and not everyone’s keen on the idea.
The language is not as crisp and fresh as Feeney’s, but it is a soothing cozy series, and Connelly knows the genre conventions inside and out. She perfected them in two previous series, including one about a former English professor, and another about a criminologist that’s being adapted to TV. All the tropes are here–friends, food, and the flurry of excitement that a man possibly thrown from a train brings to a small community. Perfect weekend fare, without an excess of “och, aye” nonsense.
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