Book Review: The Screaming Tree

Reviewed By: Fiona Walker

The Screaming Tree     Amazon UK PB Amazon UK HC
Peter Lovesey
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Psychological Suspense
Harper Collins, July 2002 (UK only), 312 pages

When he was 7, William Dickson went, with a friend, into a forest near his home. Several hours later, that friend was dead from an accident, and William was found clinging to the top of a gnarled tree, his mouth opening and closing silently in horror. He had long ago screamed himself out.

This exposure to death gives him a taste for it, and before long he has committed murder, and it will not be his last.

But then, just as he has begun college, many new faces around him, he learns that all those years before, there was a third boy with them in that forest. Yet, still, William remains the only one who came out alive, and neither of the other deaths were actually an accident. William’s memory is tricking him, hiding something diabolical that happened among those old trees. And it becomes clear that nothing he remembers, about anything, can be trusted any more…

This is a very good psychological thriller from a bright young talent. At times it echoes Ruth Rendell, and others Nicci French, which is praise indeed. The first-person narrative is written in a wonderfully personal style, and the character of William Dickson is a very fully developed one. He’s likeable, too. Even when he’s recounting to us the tales of how he killed, often in cold-blood, I still found myself hard-pressed to dislike him. The plot is awfully perplexing, and the way Lovesey drip-feeds us revelations about what is going on inside William’s head is tantalisingly suspenseful. It’s great, the way that William’s confusion about his memory is equalled by the reader’s, and their need to know what truly happened in that wood.

The final solution, though, comes slightly abruptly, and is a [very] slight anti-climax, but that is balanced by another revelations about the possible falsehoods of one more of his "memories".

This is the first novel I’ve read by Phil Lovesey, and I will certainly be keeping an eager eye out for future publications.

Fiona Walker

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Fiona Walker