What Book to Read?

Craven (2014) is the second crime thriller by Adelaide-based writer Melanie Casey. Casey uses a crime-writing device that I wouldn’t normally accept, but she uses it well, and overall I enjoyed the book.

This is a stand-alone thriller, but it would probably have been a good idea to read Hindsight (2013), the first in the series, before tackling this one. It sets out the circumstances and relationships of the main players, and these continue into this story. But Casey has done a good job of filling in the back-story, so it’s not really a problem.

What is more of a problem for me is that the main character, Cassandra Lehman, is a psychic, and comes from a family of psychics. I assume the name Cassandra is a joke – the mythical Cassandra had the power of prophecy but it was her fate never to be believed. This one has a psychic ability that enables her ‘to experience how people died when they passed suddenly or violently’. Her mother is ‘precognitive’, and her grandma is a ‘healer’. In the previous book, she used her power to help the police solve a murder and nearly died in the process.

This time she has moved from the country town where she was living to Adelaide to take up a job as a tutor at Adelaide University. She just wants to get on with her life. But even while she’s looking for a place to live, she has a vision of someone being murdered in the apartment she is looking at. And when her students find out about her ‘gift’, she is instantly notorious. Some of the attention she receives is most unpleasant.

The second strand of the story is essentially a police procedural, carried by Detective Ed Dyson from the previous book. He has moved to Adelaide for a stint in the Major Crimes Unit, and he is soon involved in a death that may or may not be murder. The man who has died left a list of names; could they be in some way connected with his death? Is he going to ask Cass to help him again? How will that go down with his colleagues? And what does he feel about her?

The two strands of the story are woven together cleverly, and Casey develops enough suspense to keep me reading on quickly to find out what happens. The baddie is quite well concealed for most of the story.  And not all of the detection depends on Cass’s gift. Casey writes well, in a lively modern idiom. There are some writers whose powerful language has me in awe of their talent, and there are some who write perfectly competently, but not that much better than I can myself. Casey is one of the latter – though admittedly I haven’t actually written a book, and she has written two. Her characterisation is good, which is important because sympathy with the characters is as important as suspense in keeping my interest.

I think Casey gets away with the psychic device because she presents it as a problem for Cass. She has accepted that her ‘visions’ are part of ‘who I am’, but it’s not a comfortable part. ‘I was a disaster when it came to being normal,’ she reflects.  Cass is overall an engaging young woman and the reader is on her side, which makes her psychic ability if not fully acceptable, at least less problematic. It’s part of the story, not just a way of solving the crime. But when Ed says at one point that for the first time he ‘fully appreciated how hard it was for Cass to try and make people believe in what she could do’ I had agree that it would indeed be hard, and had to cling to my willing suspension of disbelief – though I managed to do so.

As I noted in a post on Knitting, by another Adelaide writer, Anne Bartlett, it is pleasant to be able to visualise the setting of the story, all of which is very familiar to me. But I still wonder how a non-Adelaidean would react, and whether knowing the location makes me lazy about drawing out the setting from the description given. I know what the disused wool sheds at Port Adelaide look like – a great place to set a scene in a crime thriller. But am I seeing that, or is the writer putting it there? On the less pleasant side, Adelaide has been – unfairly of course – called the murder capital of the world, and Casey has reprised some famous Adelaide murders in her story – the method, not the actual case, though fortunately the Snowtown murders aren’t there.

I’ve been writing this post as if everyone else agrees with me that believing a psychic can solve crimes is farfetched. I don’t know what Casey really believes, but here’s a thoroughly debunking entry on psychic detectives.

You can read more about Melanie Casey here. Her book is published by Pantera Press, and will be released on 1 June.