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Book reviews |
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| DEJA VU DETECTION: IT'S IS ALL IN THE MIND
Category: Crime Fiction Bibliographic details: Bones, by Gabrielle Lord. Ringwood VIC.: McPhee Gribble, 1995. |
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DEJA VU DETECTION: IT'S IS ALL IN THE MIND Review by Giles Hugo IN her sixth novel, Bones, Sydney author Gabrielle Lord has spun her plot around two highly topical crimes - serial killing and the abuse of children by religious orders in orphanages and homes. The tale begins with a murder gone wrong. A Sydney surgeon is being protected by police while he gives evidence in a trial. He has blown the whistle on a crime syndicate which is bringing in people from various Asian countries on student visas to use them as organ donors in a highly lucrative scam. A car bomb intended for the doctor blows up his son, Alan, and devastates his family. His wife, Sybil, leaves him to live with her lover, and he goes on the witness protection program with his daughter, Polly, and a new identity - Joss Haskell, criminologist. He is found a job working with the police in a small West Australian country town. His now-hidden background as a surgeon and his expertise in medical problem solving gives him valuable insights in his new job. He becomes involved in trying to track down a serial killer who abducts young boys, beats and murders them. The most puzzling aspect is that the victims seem to disappear in broad daylight within minutes of last being seen. Joss and his colleague, Detective Sergeant Dennis Johnston, are suitably baffled as they search and probe for anything that adds up. The boys are of similar age and appearance. Their bodies are found wrapped in sheets, with a towel under the head, like a pillow, their flesh marked with the blows of what might be a braided leather whip. There are ritualistic elements and each of the locations chose for the actual killing are strikingly similar. The thot plickens, as it were, when Joss himself falls under suspicion - why was his car spotted near one of the crime scenes? Why does one of the crime scenes evoke in him a rush of deja vu? - he knows he has been there sometime... Is he suffering from amnesia? Even Johnston begins to wonder if his workmate might be hiding something. With the help of a psycho-therapist and hypnosis Joss begins to recover repressed memories of being physically abused as a child while staying in a home run by a religious order. As the details of his memories emerge, he discovers that he and the perpetrator did, in fact, share elements of a traumatic childhood. However, there is a huge set-back when their prime suspect turns out to have been dead for 12 years. The final complication comes when his wife contacts Joss, breaking his seclusion and allowing the villain he put in jail for the organ transplants scam, who has just been released from prison, to get on his trail. Lord is at her best in the internal drama, as Joss probes the subterranean depths of repressed-memory and tries to relate it to the present-day killer. Her weakest point is dialogue - too many characters speaking over-formally and sounding very much like each other. However, the murder hunt is chillingly evocative and suitably convoluted. Lord wraps up the mystery very neatly and with a certain degree of poetic justice but I was less satisfied with the last few chapters, in which Polly is kidnapped and used as bait to lure Joss. The vengeful thug sub-plot just doesn't carry equivalent tension and drama, and it is left partly unresolved. I hope Lord doesn't intend reviving it in a sequel. Nevertheless, former surgeon Joss Haskell makes an intriguing criminologist and deserves a few more cases. Reviewer: Giles Hugo
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