Down River - John Hart

...and sharply observed, don’t read Down River.

If you appreciate acute characterisation and believable action, don’t read Down River.

Enjoy engaging dialogue, convincing back-stories and clever plotting? Probably best you don’t read Down River.

However, if none of the above applies, and you prefer clumsily written mysteries, a worn-out thesaurus and plot holes you can climb through, then by all means, this ...
...being “less”.

Down River is a tale of murder, more murder and comin’ home. Oh, and spectacularly ugly people. I’m not sure whether this is intentional, but in the process of describing each and every character’s appearance, significant or (more often) not, the author manages to make everyone in the story sound like they’ve been thrown out of Cirque du Freak for scaring the kids too much. Adam Chase, then, is a returning son of a small ... more

If you like your thrillers slickly written and sharply observed, don’t read Down River.

If you appreciate acute characterisation and believable action, don’t read Down River.

Enjoy engaging dialogue, convincing back-stories and clever plotting? Probably best you don’t read Down River.

However, if none of the above applies, and you prefer clumsily written mysteries, a worn-out thesaurus and plot holes you can climb through, then by all means, this is a book to savour. Some books and films (and people, for that matter) have quite mystifying levels of success, and John Hart’s second novel is very much one of these. I’m not sure whether Richard & Judy’s Summer Reads is a mark of high-calibre literature, but they make some pretty solid choices, more or less. This being “less”.

Down River is a tale of murder, more murder and comin’ home. Oh, and spectacularly ugly people. I’m not sure whether this is intentional, but in the process of describing each and every character’s appearance, significant or (more often) not, the author manages to make everyone in the story sound like they’ve been thrown out of Cirque du Freak for scaring the kids too much. Adam Chase, then, is a returning son of a small North Carolina town who was previously exiled; his acquittal on murder charges apparently insufficient to convince a suspicious populace.

But now he’s back, and he’s not taking any rubbish. Damn, no. The heir to a substantial fortune, he fancies patching things up with his estranged family and ex-girlfriend. Bad things, specifically dead bodies have a habit of following in Adam’s wake, however (not in an arms-aloft, groaning zombie kind of way, although that might have made the book marginally more interesting). No sooner is he back in town, people start to get assaulted and murdered, and all eyes are on our hero – can he get to the bottom of all this? Can he convince the police he’s not involved? Will his family take him back? Do we care?

I’m trying to find positives in Down River, if only for change of pace. It’s pretty fast-moving, as a book with so many deaths in it is likely to be, and there’s a twisting and turning whodunit sort of plotline that is vaguely interesting, but its spins around so many times, it’s hard to care when the guilt finally settles on someone. On top of this, it’s a pretty funny book, although I can’t imagine much of this is intentional.

The problems are manyfold, unfortunately.

Hart’s writing is a big part of this – he’s not bad when he’s rendered the landscape in which the story is set; in his descriptions of farmland and river, you get an evocative sense of personal attachment, and he conveys well enough what an area of land means to a person or family. However, he really struggles to write characters.

His physical descriptions are, for want of a better word, horrible. You get the impression that he’s attended a distinctly second-rate creative writing class that’s convinced him that the more adjectives he can throw into a paragraph, the better. As a consequence, he describes everything and everyone, and overdoes it painfully. It’s not enough that a man is tall, he has to be “tall and strong and muscular” with a hunched back and flakes of skin on his glasses. Everyone ends up sounding like a monster, and you wish he’d had his thesaurus taken off him when he starts piling up the adjectives for the next minor character to make an appearance.
Alongside the clunky style, characters are also bemusingly inconsistent – a Mexican hotel employee speaks in perfect English one moment, then a couple of lines down the page sounds like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

The police are similarly implausible – which, for an author with a legal background is surprising. I’m sure Hart knows his stuff, but it fails to make the transition from his mind to the page, resulting in some almost ludicrous conclusions drawn from almost no evidence, and some over-the-top reactions that one can only hope doesn’t represent American police forces.

Down River is, in short, a stinker. There are many excellent thrillers out there, and failing that, there are plenty of plain average ones that you would do well to read before this. I’ll finish with one of my favourite lines, describing a small child:

‘She was so black she was purple.”

Sorry, what?
 

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