Reviewed By: Ali Karim - RAM
Bleak Water
Amazon US PB Amazon UK PB Amazon UK HC Amazon Canada PB
Danuta Reah
Class/Genre: Mystery
2002
Eliza Eliot is the curator of a new art gallery, opened on the banks of a rundown canal that cuts through the deprived northern England city of Sheffield. Despite its off-the-beaten-track location, Eliza has high hopes for this space (and her career), fueled by her opportunity to show the latest works by wunderkind Daniel Flynn, her former lover, who has finished a series of reworkings of Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel's The Triumph of Death. However, her excitement is tempered by sad memories of a four-year-old murder, and by the more recent car-accident death of Eliza's friend Maggie. Soon, more bodies turn up, the victims showing sinister links to the visceral madness portrayed in Brueghel's art. Are these the acts of a random psychopath, or can the modern murders be connected to the tragedy of four years ago? Reah offers here a complex, character-driven narrative that peeks into the dark side of human nature. Distinctive secondary players abound, from a drug addicted (and sexual thrill-seeking) policewoman who's trying to cope both with the investigation and her own demons, to her supposedly straight-laced boss soon (also tempted by the pleasures of the flesh). Throw in a dead prostitute, teenagers in peril, a prisoner incarcerated for pedophilia and a backstory from Madrid's bohemian side, and you have a haunting, multi-viewpoint tale by an author who understands that people's psyches are multi-leveled, and that no one is ever really innocent.
Ali Karim - RAM
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