Blind Pursuit
By Matthew F. Jones
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $22
The Church of Dead Girls
By Stephen Dobyns
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 388 pages, $23
Disciples
By Austin Wright
Baskerville, 300 pages, $22
The secret of a successful thriller is making the reader complicit in the thrill. Shivers of fear, rapidly alternating with dread and ever-so-slight twinges of guilt, are the rules of the game.
The tone in each of these three new novels is set by the criminal urge to muss up a beautiful girl. Is it little girls’ sweetness, the ineluctable lure of their innocence, that draws the twisted psychopath like a moth to the flame? In Matthew F. Jones’ “Blind Pursuit,” due out this month, scarcely a day passes after the disappearance of 8-year-old Jennifer Follett from the end of her driveway while waiting for the school bus before a snake slithers out on horseback from a stable near the small town in upstate New York where this novel is set.
“In the gray, murky light preceding the sun’s rising . . . (w)earing chaps over pressed jeans, a light sweater, polished riding boots, and a shell cap on his head of slightly graying hair, the rider athletically steered the spirited bay Thoroughbred stallion, forcefully blowing phlegm from its nostrils, through a dew-damp field of timothy and clover . . . onto a needle-covered path bisecting nearly a thousand acres of woods” near the home of Jennifer, her little brother and their parents, Edmund and Caroline Follett.
While the horseman presumably goes about some dark business in the woods, Edmund stares sadly out of his kitchen window at “the wrought-iron bench he had bought especially for Jennifer to sit on while waiting for the bus.” At the kitchen table, Caroline, “in a Valium-affected drone,” touches on a fear guaranteed to snag the attention of young ex-urban professionals everywhere:
” `. . . ironic, that we–one of our chief reasons, I mean, for moving to the country, Edmund, was that it would be safer for the childr–‘
” `This isn’t something I decided on alone, Caroline. . . .’
” `I’m not being accusatory, Edmund. It’s just now our little girl is–and the world–it suddenly seems precariously large and danger. . . .’
“Edmund turned from the window.
” `We will find her–please, God!–won’t we, Edmund?’
” `Yes. We will.’ “
The guilty-conscience angle is not lost on Frank Levy, a local investigator assigned to find Jennifer and bring her kidnapper to justice. His explanation for Edmund and Caroline’s rush to blame the nanny for not keeping an eye on Jennifer while she waited for the school bus has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: “My guess is, Edmund and Caroline, not wanting to admit it, are feeling more than a little guilty about going off every 5:30 a.m. to their six-figure jobs while leaving their kids to get raised up by a babysitter.”
Levy and his partner, Mike Abbott, provide the lighter moments in this melodramatic but well-paced thriller, which is Jones’ fourth novel. Their witty repartee at headquarters rings true, as does their rapid-fire interrogation of suspects in tracking down Jennifer’s captor.
Stephen Dobyns’ “The Church of Dead Girls” relies less on melodrama, more on quietly suspenseful first-person narration to probe the deep psychological reasons for kidnapping and mutilating girls. One by one, three teenagers disappear from the quiet, tree-lined streets of Aurelius, a small town in upstate New York. “There must be hundreds of towns like ours in the East,” says the narrator. “Sleepy, they’re called.” Wakeup calls come in small packages delivered after each disappearance, containing the vanished girl’s clothes, neatly pressed and folded, with a mannequin’s left hand lying eerily still and lifelike on top.
Unlike “Blind Pursuit,” which unfolds over the course of three days in segments neatly tagged with the time of day, the narrative strategy of “The Church of Dead Girls” has its fastidious, oddly engaging narrator obsessively recount events leading up to the girls’ murders, searching for clues that might have tipped the townsfolk off that something wicked was headed their way. “There are always incidents that precede an outrage and that seem unconnected or otherwise innocent, a whole web of incidents, each imperceptibly connected to the next,” he says early on.
One incident is a bomb scare at the local elementary school. Another is the murder of the local nymphomaniac, a big mouth who had a nasty habit of bragging about her conquests. Enter Houari Chihani–an arrogant stranger raised in Algeria who holds a doctoral degree in history and is hired to teach at Aurelius College–and what we have is an ugly racial incident waiting to happen. Interviewed for an article in the local paper, Chihani, when asked what he thinks of his new neighbors, declares: “They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. . . . Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance. . . .”
In addition to having a face like “some bird of prey,” Chihani has a limp, which results in his right leg hitting the ground with “a clumping noise” when he walks. His vehicle of choice is a red Citroen, a blight on the town’s patriotic spirit. The stridency of the Marxist reading group Chihani has the temerity to form shortly after his arrival further steams the locals, and from then on the creepiness mounts with Hitchcockian intensity. Everybody’s dark side is out of the closet. A vigilante group forms to assist the fumbling efforts of local law enforcement, hormone-crazed twentysomethings mount vicious attacks on homosexuals, and the narrator (who–hint, hint–drinks tea from a china cup and reads Daphne DuMaurier) begins to fear for his life.
The bloody conclusion is worth the wait, as the killer is stalked through the woods in the snow and finally dragged to justice. In the aftermath, the narrator ponders how the girls’ “sweetness must have sung” to the killer “and how insistent it must have grown as it led him to take more chances.” This raises the requisite goosebumps, as does the question, “Is it possible that voice exists in all of us but in most it is quiet?”
Austin Wright’s forthcoming “Disciples” spins the tale of a little girl’s kidnapping and rescue through the voices of eight characters. The novel begins with Harry Field, a retired professor of history, calmly writing a speech on fakes and charlatans in his office at home while his granddaughter, Hazel, naps nearby. After Harry unwittingly hands over Hazel to her estranged father, the narrative begins the first of many shifts into different voices, with each character giving his or her version of events.
This is an interesting but clunky move, because the voices are mostly undifferentiated, and each character backtracks over actions the reader has already taken in. The story is a wild ride, involving a cult operating out of a remote New England village, a mysterious “accident” above a waterfall and a mock trial on an island off the coast of Maine.
“Disciples” doesn’t tweak the reader’s guilt as much as “Blind Pursuit” or “The Church of Dead Girls,” and it’s less thrilling. High-stakes drama is what the thriller genre demands, and Dobyns and Jones, to their credit, deliver it in spades. So go ahead–thrill yourself. Bury those toes in the sand and take a dip into your dark side. But beware: Afterward you may want to slap a “For Sale” sign on those Greek Revival pillars on the front porch and move with your little girl back to the city, where the police are the ones on horseback and all the snakes stay where they belong–in the zoo.
