Random Things Tours: The Quiet People by Paul Cleave

 

If you have a small child you better don´t start reading The Quiet People by the New Zealand-based multi-awarded author Paul Cleave, recently published by the suspenseful Orenda Books edition house. Or does it really make sense to avoid reading books which may have some slight connection to your real situation for sparing yourself the heart break and the anxiety attacks? Will leave it for another day this in-depth conversation about at what extent books can be relatable and particularly how thriller - and horror, only if I think about Carrie or Shining - books can deeply shake our psyche.

This time though, I better continue with the book...

Zach, the seven year old son of the successful power writing couple of Cameron & Lisa Murdoch disappears without trace. In any case, the traces the police thinks it found are misleading therefore for a long time, the principal suspects are the parents themselves. 

´I´m thinking, what if this isn´t the other side of the coin? Instead of writing about all the things they know, what if this is the time they´re acting upon it?´

Although the writers are interesting characters, the policemen and -women were for me the most creative human presences into the book, as they are setting up the pace of the story and the next episodes of the narrative. Personally, I haven´t bought the hypothesis of the parents murdering their child for various literary-wise reasons but I am sure that my judgement was purely emotional without actually taking into account the then-stage of the police inquiry. 

I´ve started the book in the evening and couldn´t abandon it until the end, my heart skipping in the throat. The story is told in diary-like installments, short chapters written in a very alert pace. The simple structure of the sentence is leading the reader on the path towards more mystery and unexpected twists that do include once in a while some parenting-related observations, inserted not in a lecturing way, but just to outline certain ideas and behaviors. Don´t expect to really know where everything leads until the very end anyway.

The Quiet People is a jewel of a thriller book with leaves you energy-deprived and worried but this is what does it mean to be under the spell of words.

Rating: 5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own