T.R. Richmond - What She Left

Rating: 3/5

Review:
An interesting idea, but not well enough written

This is an excellent idea for a crime thriller which didn't quite work in the execution.

The story is a mystery about the death of a young journalist, Alice Salmon, by drowning: was she killed, did she fall or did she commit suicide? The mystery is solved not by the police but by Jeremy Cooke, an aging professor of anthropology who knew Alice and her mother and who decides to write a tribute book to Alice by collecting newspaper articles, diaries, tweets, blogs, random jottings by those involved and so on to piece together a portrait of her life and death.

It's a strikingly original and very interesting idea, which for the first 100 pages or so I found excellent. The structure is as random as its "source material" with all sorts of older bits and pieces and later letters interspersed among material about the time of Alice's death. The trouble is, you need to be really, really good to keep this up convincingly and grippingly. I'm afraid T.R Richmond isn't quite up to it, so by the time I got to about page 250 I had a sinking feeling when I realised that I still had to get through over another 100 pages.

The major problem is with the characters' voices, which I didn't think remained sufficiently individual or convincing. It all starts out very well, and Richmond initially does a good job of capturing characters and the way things develop on Twitter or in below the line comment on articles. It isn't kept up, though, and styles begin to falter. As an example, the glue which holds the plot together is Jeremy Cooke's letters to a friend which effectively form a detailed journal. Cooke is an old-fashioned linguistic pedant, but his writing is littered with errors that a man like that would find repellent: "elucidates" foe "elicits", "hung" for "hanged", and so on. At one point he actually corrects another character:
"That stuff they've written about Alice and me, it's pure fantasy."
"Alice and I," I said. "It's Alice and I."
Well, no it isn't - Alice and me is correct. I wouldn't usually be so picky, but there's a lot of this sort of thing and for a character based almost solely on his voice and who makes such a point of these things there were enough solecisms to keep wrecking the character for me. This happened to an extent with other characters, too - the voices weren't sufficiently convincing to maintain my belief.

Also, as the book wore on, many of the voices began to sound less like those of their character and more like that of a novelist. This showed both in their language and in the way they structured blog posts, diary entries or letters not as any normal person would do, but to create little cliffhangers and to conceal the real point of what they are writing. We get the usual false leads and switching of suspicion from one character to another in this way and eventually it all felt rather contrived and mannered rather than innovative and fresh.

I'm sorry to be so critical, but I didn't much enjoy the book in the end. It turns out to be a pretty ordinary thriller with an unconvincing denouement and lots of people learning little life lessons as a result - complete with an epilogue of rather sententious advice written by Alice to her younger self. It's a very interesting idea for structuring a book and it has its moments, but I can't really recommend it.