Customer Reviews

Running Woman

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
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A teenage girl drowns during a storm and the hunt is on to find the killer, of whom there is only a brief description. An atmospheric and intriguing thriller. Perhaps a bit more demanding of the reader than most, but the extra effort pays dividend. The book has a real sense of menace and excellent characterisation.

Perfect book for a cold winter's night by the fire reading. Carlon is a cross between Christie and Du Maurier. I only wish more of her works were in print.

Reviewers are always so ready to compare a newly discovered writer to those currently writing. Carlon's crime novels (originally written in the 1960s and early 1970s) certainly call to mind Rendell and Walters, but I found that she has much more in common with those of her past contemporaries Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong and Margaret Millar. All these women wrote superior suspense novels and mysteries that dealt with seamy characters, vengeful plots and twists of fate that often left the protagonist at the mercy of a cruel world. The Running Woman is a story of the fear people succumb to when faced with rumor and lies. What will people think of me? How will I live my life surrounded by neighbors who cast their eyes down upon me, judging me for something I didn't do? Gabriel is caught from the start when the parents of a drowned girl insist she was seen fleeing from the scene and, because Gabriel can't swim, is held responsible for the girl's death. What follows is a relentless maze of lies, rumors, gossip with the continually moving fingers of the townspeople pointing at anyone but themselves and their crazed need to discover the identity of the woman in white seen running from the creek. Does she even exist?

Readers may tire of the feud between Gabriel and her frighteningly disbelieving cousin, Phil. But it is worth plowing ahead to the point where Gabriel is left alone in the house while Phil (at last beginning to defend his relative) goes out in search of the truth. And in the meantime, Gabriel falls victim (literally) to a terrifying trap that leaves one breathless and practically crying out to Phil to save her.

The Running Woman has fundamentally a very good concept for a psychological thriller. The bottom line, though, is that Carlon does not have the chops (the technique) to pull off the trick. I wouldn't advise a reader to seek out this book and don't think it belongs in the classic category of detective novels.

The first problem is that Carlon fails to pull off that key distinction necessary in a novel in which the protagonist spends much of the first half confused by events: making that character confused but not dim. Unfortunately, the protagonist, Gabriel, comes off as the latter.

Another major problem is that there are dark hints that the entire mystery is connected to the death of Gabriel's husband a few months earlier. I am just amazed that Carlon did not pursue the angle and just let the whole matter drop.

On a more detailled level, Carlon's writing is often confusing and full of cloying conversational tactics. None of the characters emerges as fully drawn or, for that matter, particularly interesting. Following the details of the crucial incident, which happens prior to the book's opening, is also confusing. This isn't necessarily a mistake -- the book's tension, at least in the beginning, depends on a level of confusion and misremembering what initially doesn't appear to be a very important hour -- but I couldn't help but feel that, again, there is a key distinction between confusing the reader and presenting a clear picture of confused memories.

In sum, a disappointing effort. It makes one realize just how difficult it is to write an effective thriller.

After the good review in the New York Times, this book was a major disappointment for me. I found the characters charmless (the protagonist was especially irritating), the dialogue unsubtle and unnatural, and the plot complications overconvoluted and unbelievable. I did keep reading to the end, because there was a certain thrust to the narrative and because I wanted to find out what the solution was without jumping ahead. Also, the Australian setting adds a certain amount of interest.

I found Patricia Carlon's "The Running Woman" to be a bit of a disappointment. The basic premise is a good one. A child drowns after falling from a footbridge and because a young fair-haired woman is seen fleeing the seen of the "accident," every young fair-haired woman in this small Australian town falls under suspicion. So far, so good. But far too many of the book's scant 187 pages are devoted to the hypothetical ruminations by various characters on what might have happened on that bridge. Each new hypothesis contradicts the previous one, so that the reader has to keep backing up and starting over again from the beginning. I was reminded of those old movies in which each suspect gives Philo Vance/Hercule Poirot/Miss Marple/etc. a different account of the events leading up to a murder, so that the viewer sees the same crime essayed over and over again from a different point of view. But here, the hypothetical accounts go on far too long. Also, the main character commits one unbelievable blunder after another, sacrificing credibility in the interest of further complicating the mystery. Carlon should have ditched the endless recreations of the events on the bridge and given her story a few more legitimate plot twists. Not until the last thirty or forty pages is the readers patience with this novel finally, if meagerly, rewarded.