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Grab that cash with both hands ….

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The Summons

John Grisham

Nothing like second-hand bookshops to deliver the goods even if they’re so often full of pap, sap and crap. Grisham’s no stranger in these places, what with more than 50 runaway best-sellers and 50 million sales, and well worth a revisit.

When lawyer Ray Atlee’s father, a well-regarded judge, falls off the perch to cancer, there’s just him and a hopeless addict brother to figure in his role as executor of the old boy’s will. Mum’s long gone. Apart from a near-derelict antebellum home in old Mississippi, there’s a not-so-grand total of just six grand in the kitty.

Until, that is, Ray finds a cash cache of some $3 million squirrelled away in the house.

Where the hell did it come from? The old man was straight as a die. Never ever earned anything like this much. He’d given all his other money away, to charities and anyone who needed it.

What to do with it? Declare it in the estate and the IRS will help itself to half. Is it clean? Is it marked? Did the judge actually own it?

If Ray splits it with junkie bro, how long will said bad-arse last before OD-ing?

All the makings of a fair dilemma, and one which rapidly becomes a dilemma on steroids as other more serious bad-arses start intimidating Ray with break-ins, tracking his movements with millimetre precision, fires, phone and letter threats, phoney authority cautions ….

Ray’s a sharp lawyer himself and sets about figuring how to stash, launder and invest the money. If only his pursuers didn’t know every hidey-hole he tucks away the cash, forcing him into a wild nomadic lifestyle with a boot-load of cash while trying to investigate a mysterious trial his father adjudicated.

Enter the big end of town, unscrupulous lawyers, class actions, murderous flunkies and Ray’s basically at his wit’s end. Just when he thinks he get to the bottom of the mystery, with all its attendant moral ambiguities, you’d be tempted to think it’s a fair way to wrap up a scintillating tale.

But Grisham, as usual, has a few surprises up his sleeve. If you’re paying attention, you might anticipate them but then again maybe not.

Gripping, solidly-paced and clever stuff – at a good second-hand store near you.

 

History-mystery repeats itself

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The Vanishing Place, by Zoe Rankin, Hachette

Okay, you emerge from the deep bush of New Zealand as a young girl after fleeing a mad/bad, abusive/loving dad who kept you, your siblings and your mum apart from the world.

Mum’s dead, dad’s clean off his rocker, a serious and paranoid boozehound killing blokes with shovels, so it’s get out of Dodge time, even if your siblings won’t follow.

Locals are flummoxed by your wild child nature, authorities never get a handle on anything and a new isolation, bar one or two tight friends, and haunting memories and grief, make life a painful, stressful daily travail.

Fast forward some 17 years and our protagonist, Effie, has long fled the Long White Cloud for Scotland when she’s petitioned back home by the policeman boyfriend she was forced to leave behind. The magnet is dynamic, she can’t resist.

There’s a curious job to investigate and he needs a very singular hand; an eight-year-old red-headed girl has just emerged from the wilderness, collapsing half-starved in a shop, with blood all over her hands.

She’s clearly traumatised. Won’t talk. Says her name, Anya, then slams the door shut. Shrieks at anyone trying to talk to her, attacks them tooth and nail.

Chillingly, she’s also the dead spit of Effie when she wandered out of the bush, red hair, green eyes.

History-mystery is repeating itself, with a poisonous unavoidable question: is her father still out?

Faced again with everything she’d tried to escape, the isolation and fear enforced by damaged parents, Effie is the only one who can get through to Anya, but it’s an agonising task, for both: one terrified, religious mania-like, of her new surroundings; the other of revisiting her horrific past – as well as her painful lost love.

Author Rankin employs a rapid-fire, present-past-present-past technique to relate the two stories. It’s a somewhat infuriating mechanism running two tales in tandem but it’s effective in maintaining a tense and compelling narrative. Mercifully, the to-and-fro annoyance is abated by short, sharp and fast-moving chapters.

That aside, Rankin delivers a harrowing account of murder and mayhem as police raid the bush home the still-mute Anya escaped. And as Effie, unconvinced by the all-too-neat findings of the police, inevitably and foolishly returns to the wilderness with Anya to find an unexpected, and very nasty, small but deadly cult. But no so sign of her father.

Things turn very pear-shaped when she’s predictably trapped, chained, starved, humiliated and menaced with a misogynistic religious zealotry. Effie’s outlook is even bleaker when Anya reappears beside one of the cult’s monsters to chastise her and order her to repent for not fulfilling a biblical female submission to men.

That’s enough spoilers for one review. Rest assured, sufficient twists and turns exist to make the book one that will keep you reading well into the night. You might find daytime just that little bit more comfortable.