Customer Reviews

Gone to Ground

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a well known thriller writer said of John Harvey, "He writes the way we all wish we could." More than true. If you haven't given yourself the pleasure of reading a Harvey book, do it now. His prose is spare, his plotting is intricately wrought and quickly paced, his characters sharply drawn, affecting. Harvey's descriptive skill captures minds as well as eyes - can you not see "the ivory lozenge" of a doorbell?

A stand alone British police procedural following his enormously successful Charlie Resnick series, Gone to Ground reunites Will Grayson and Helen Walker (who were introduced in an earlier short story ). They're at the top of Cambridge's Major Investigation Team, and have worked together for three years. Now they're faced with a particularly heinous crime - the fatal beating of Stephen Bryan. This was an act so brutal that "the man's face...was like a glove that had been pulled inside out."

Bryan's lodging had been ransacked but what could a gay teacher have had that was worth murder? He was well thought of, apparently liked by his colleagues. When Grayson and Walker learn that Bryan has recently ended a relationship with former lover, Mark McKusick, they focus on him. A crime of jealousy and passion?

However, it's not long before other events catch their eyes - recent homophobic related gang beatings, threats made to Bryan demanding that he stop working on a book he was writing about Stella Leonard, a ` 50s film star. Bryan's sister, Lesley, a radio newscaster is frustrated by what she considers to be lack of results by police so she begins an investigation of her own. Enter Howard Prince, a zealous real estate broker married to Stella's apparently unstable sister, and Natalie Prince, a relative of Stella's and a young actress who has a tendency to run riot.

Together Lesley and Natalie make some astounding discoveries.

However, for this reader it's not the solving of the crime that lingers but the sheer delight in Harvey's telling which, at times, borders on the poetic. He's a consummate craftsman, a topnotch storyteller.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

The murdered body of a gay academic is found in his own shower, savagely beaten and almost unrecognizable. The police start an investigation with detectives Will Grayson and Helen Walker as the leads and they naturally home straight in on the victim's former lover, whom they question at length but fail in making any connection with the crime. The area where the man lived is home to a number of homophobic thugs, all of whom have taken part in random and often mistaken bashings on anyone they choose. It's an ugly situation, made uglier by the poverty, ignorance and hooliganism of the East Midlands at that time. Helen herself is attacked and hospitalised while Will is left to try to make some kind of connection with the fact that the murder victim was attempting to write the life story of a former 50's movie star and getting no cooperation from her remaining family, only threats from the bully boy husband of her grandaughter. There are some very dark sides to this story which was very well written and which would hold the reader's interest, right to the end.

As a well known thriller writer said of John Harvey, "He writes the way we all wish we could." More than true. If you haven't given yourself the pleasure of reading a Harvey book, do it now. His prose is spare, his plotting is intricately wrought and quickly paced, his characters sharply drawn, affecting. Harvey's descriptive skill captures minds as well as eyes - can you not see "the ivory lozenge" of a doorbell?

A stand alone British police procedural following his enormously successful Charlie Resnick series, Gone to Ground reunites Will Grayson and Helen Walker (who were introduced in an earlier short story ). They're at the top of Cambridge's Major Investigation Team, and have worked together for three years. Now they're faced with a particularly heinous crime - the fatal beating of Stephen Bryan. This was an act so brutal that "the man's face...was like a glove that had been pulled inside out."

Bryan's lodging had been ransacked but what could a gay teacher have had that was worth murder? He was well thought of, apparently liked by his colleagues. When Grayson and Walker learn that Bryan has recently ended a relationship with former lover, Mark McKusick, they focus on him. A crime of jealousy and passion?

However, it's not long before other events catch their eyes - recent homophobic related gang beatings, threats made to Bryan demanding that he stop working on a book he was writing about Stella Leonard, a ` 50s film star. Bryan's sister, Lesley, a radio newscaster is frustrated by what she considers to be lack of results by police so she begins an investigation of her own. Enter Howard Prince, a zealous real estate broker married to Stella's apparently unstable sister, and Natalie Prince, a relative of Stella's and a young actress who has a tendency to run riot.

Together Lesley and Natalie make some astounding discoveries.

However, for this reader it's not the solving of the crime that lingers but the sheer delight in Harvey's telling which, at times, borders on the poetic. He's a consummate craftsman, a topnotch storyteller.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

Past and present overlap when British film professor Stephen Bryan is brutally murdered in his home. At first it seems to be a crime of passion or a hate crime (the victim was gay), but soon the case becomes more complicated. Prof. Bryan was working on a book, a biography of a 1950s movie star named Stella Leonard. As the local police and Bryan's journalist sister investigate his death, the old movie star and her dysfunctional family keep coming into view. It seems someone didn't want Stella Leonard's secrets to be made public in a biography. And the killing may not be over....

I love John Harvey's books. His writing is always clear and straightforward and perfectly detailed. His Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder series are wonderful, but in GONE TO GROUND he introduces a new pair of police investigators who should delight all fans of British mysteries. Will Grayson (married with kids) and Helen Walker (alone and not happy about it) are a great team, and their first case is very exciting. Highly recommended.

Loath as I am to be the sole dissenting voice here, I have to say that I wasn't very impressed with "Gone to Ground." True, the prose style is exquisite, but I didn't think that the mystery at hand was very suspenseful at all, and found the two police detectives to be rather bland characters. What really saved the book for me was the subplot involving the murder victim's reporter sister -- that subplot was well developed and rather interesting, and gave "Gone to Ground" the energy the book truly needed.

At first glance, the brutal murder of Stephen Bryan looks like a robbery gone very wrong, but as Det. Insp. Will Grayson and Det. Sgt. Helen Walker take in the scene of the crime, they begin to wonder if it might have been a case of murder masked to look like something else. Both detectives have a suspect in mind, but trying to pin this suspect down is proving a lot more difficult than expected. And then Stephen's sister, Lesley, discovers that a manuscript that Stephen was working on, about the life of a 1950s film star, has gone missing, and that the film star's family was less than thrilled about Stephen's interest. Have Grayson and Walker been concentrating on the wrong suspect?

Part of the problem with "Gone to Ground" was that I didn't find either Grayson and Walker to be very engaging characters, and you really need for the chief protagonists to be charismatic enough to carry the story. And then there were the bits of the book having to do with Grayson's family problems and Walker's personal life -- they weren't very interesting either. The other thing I found disconcerting about "Gone to Ground" was the plodding pacing of the book -- I didn't find the book to be very suspenseful or riveting, a reaction I was not expecting given how absorbing and compelling I've found Harvey's Frank Elder and his Charlie Resnick books to be. The subplot that saved this book for me was the one dealing with Lesley's investigation into what Stephen was researching. Not only was the subplot a very intriguing one, but Lesley as a character was a very compelling and engaging one as well, giving the book the kind of zip and energy is seemd to be lacking. And that, together with John Harvey's exquisite prose is what made "Gone to Ground" a 3 1/2 star read.

A few detective novelists are as good at the "novelist" part as they are at the "detective" part--maybe better.

Such people as Robert Crais, Sara Paretsky, Robert Barnard, Lawrence Block (in the Scudder novels) create characters and situations that are involving and emotionally true--whatever the supposed "thriller" plot may be.

John Harvey is certainly one of these.

His prose is superb. He trained as a poet, and it shows. His word-choice is spectacular--tight, multilayered, vivid.

Even better are his characters.

In this one, we get a whole new set: principally the Cambridge police detective team Will Grayson and Helen Walker.

Grayson is stiff but tough. He has a lot to learn--not about detecting, but about life--and, amazingly, he learns it.

Walker is excellent. Sharp-tongued, brave, bright, sassy, tenacious. When she is attacked, you can feel your heart sink. She's like a real person, like one of your friends.

There are two plots here, but they converge.

Great stuff.

If you haven't read Harvey, and like good prose, good novels, and interesting thrillers, give him a try.

A solid mixture of British murder mystery and police procedural this novel orbits around the life a long-dead b-grade film actress and a modern day murder that at first appears to be a hate crime. But it is also in this story, that author John Harvey debuts too new detectives, Detective Inspector Will Grayson and Detective Sergeant Helen Walker, whose complicated personal lives add much to the three dimensionality and excitement of this tale.

The thirty-something gay academic Stephen Bryan's career has been such a success that he's even started research a biography about Stella Leonard's life, a glamorous fifties film star who died a mystifying death in a car accident. Never a super-star, Stella did achieve a modicum of fame after she starred in a reasonably successful noir movie called Shattered Glass. But then suddenly Stella was dead, the car she was a passenger in driven inexplicably off the road and into a ravine on one dark and stormy night.

This tangential event echoes throughout the decades when Bryan is found murdered, his body found horribly bruised and mutilated in his shower, his face like a glove that had been pulled, the upper part, in particular beaten almost beyond recognition. It appears as though Stephen was robbed as his laptop was stolen along with his wallet and credit cards. Helen Walker thinks the crime might have been a lovers' tiff, but Will Grayson is pretty sure that Stephen could have been murdered by a bit of "rough trade."

Perhaps Bryan had gone out cruising, picked up some bloke, bought him home, and "things turned nasty around act four." In the crucial first early days of the investigation the first character to entail suspicion is Bryan's on-again, off-again boyfriend Mark McKusick. Mark hadn't seen Stephen for a few weeks after they'd had a falling out, at least a month before his death. At first Mark is appalled at the tragedy even as collapses on the floor in the interrogation office and wails in pain, hitting himself across the face in anguish.

Both Helen and Will are convinced that Mark is lying or play-acting, perhaps even selling them a bill of goods. He's the only sensible suspect, the motive being rejection, Bryan calling a halt to the relationship because of the accompanying issues of fidelity. House-to-house enquiries yield little about Bryan's movements in the days before. Even more puzzling is that after initial conversations with Bryan's former colleagues, Will and Helen finds that although he was not yet all that well-known, Bryan had been generally liked and respected.

Then Stephen's girlfriend Lesley Scarman arrives on the scene just back from New Zealand. An intrepid and fearless reporter from BBC radio Nottingham, Lesley is determined to unveil the truth behind her brother's murder, not once believing that her Stephen would go out cruising and looking for casual sex. Leslie is anxious to learn of the progress, if any, that Will and Helen are making with the case.

At this stage in the story, a number of unrelated characters enter the narrative in a complicated maze that stretches throughout the chilly environs of Nottingham City and its accompanying surrounds. Natalie Prince, a boozy, beautiful actress with penchant for newsworthy misbehavior arrives, in talks to star in a remake of Shattered Glass that starred her great aunt Stella Leonard.

Natalie and Lesley form an unlikely partnership with Leslie determined to find out more about Stella Leonard so that maybe she can find out why Stella's life was so important to Bryan. There's also the Machiavellian figure of Natalie's father, Howard Prince, millionaire property developer who rears his shady head, An influential man who wields a certain gravitas both above and below the law, Stephen had contacted him a number of times about this potential biography of Stella Leonard, but Prince had threatened Stephen, telling him to stay away.

In this dark story that centers on homophobia, gang violence, and long buried family secrets, Gone to Ground offers up countless red herrings and twists and turns as Helen and Will work diligently, gathering bits of evidence until they can form a interconnected picture of Bryan's activities leading up to his murder, not to mention all of the men that had orbited his life.

All of the main players are faced with challenges: Will, unhappy in his marriage to Lorraine, struggles with the pressures of young fatherhood; Helen, trying desperately to forget an ex-lover, finds herself, along with two students, a victim of a brutal and thuggish attack in Cambridge; and Leslie, who must contend not only with the death of her brother, but finds herself up against the indefinable power of Howard Prince as he brandishes his fast political and economic influence throughout the East Midlands.

The clues gradually turn up in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, one step forward, two steps back, with nothing coming together the way it should. In the end, perhaps it is the legend of Stella Leonard that holds the key to Stephen's death or even Russell Johnson, who had apparently spent the night with Bryan, five days before he was murdered. Although the plot tends over-reach a bit and the narrative slows down in the final third, Harvey's novel is still engaging read for those who love to curl up with British crime fiction. Mike Leonard February 08.

First Sentence: 1. EXT. COAST ROAD. NIGHT. A blank screen.

Detective Will Grayson's latest victim, Stephen Bryant, is a writer working on the life of late actress Stella Leonard. He had been warned off questioning Leonard's family; is that why he is dead? Bryant had also recently broken off from his gay lover; is that why he is dead? Detective Walker is caught up and stabbed trying to break up a gay bashing; is being gay why Bryant is dead?

Harvey is such a good, solid writer. He knows how to create interesting characters, write realistic dialogue, build a plot, and tie everything together at the end. I liked the new characters and felt this was a more traditional, less dark book than some of this others. The protagonist here was rather refreshing in that he's is a normal marriage with normal problems is just trying to keep everything on track. I particularly enjoyed how he wove the story from the past into the present. I shan't say this is the best book he's ever written, but I don't think he's ever written a really bad book either.

It's of course a matter of taste - if you like gritty, minimalist crime fiction in the Yankee mode, then you may well enjoy its relocation to London by Mr. Harvey. But if, like me, you are an Anglophile who gobbles up British mystery series authors such as P.D. James and Elizabeth George, I would place Mr. Harvey well down your to-investigate list.
Harvey trawls the lower depths of human behavior,employs clipped dialogue and keeps the descriptive writing and oldworld atmosphere to a minimum, and he seems to find life a drab, colorless affair - a healthy smattering of f-bombs (whatever happened to 'bugger'?) stand in for humor, warmth and the perennial 'cuppas' beloved of the genre.
I have read some 20 series authors (Grimes, Rankin, Robinson, Reginald Hill etc), so if you're searching for other series, I recommend Deborah Crombie, Caroline Graham - delightfully subtle wit - and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' Bill Slider mysteries, Ms. H-Eagles being a writer in an extremely happy rhythm with her characters and series. A more serious author who writes with unusual complexity and care is Stephen Booth. There are others as well.