Review of GRANITE HARBOR by Peter Nichols

 3 Stars

Alex Brangwen, a Booker-nominated British novelist, is now a police detective in Granite Harbor, a coastal community in Maine. A teenager is brutally murdered and his body left at the Settlement, a local archaeological site where locals work as historic enactors. Fear in the community ramps up when a second teenager disappears. To complicate matters for Alex, his daughter Sophie is friends of both teenagers, and she and another friend fear they may be the next victims as it seems a serial killer is on the prowl.

I listened to an audio version and I think my feelings about the book were influenced by the audio narrator. He used an unidentifiable accent for Alex and had him speak in a monotone that really bothered me. Alex ends up sounding like a stereotypical villain in a bad movie. Actually, the narrator uses a flat, unmodulated voice for the entire novel.

This is supposed to be character-driven crime fiction, but it doesn’t work as such for me. Alex is not a compelling character. Most of the time he doesn’t seem to know what to do and in fact ends up doing very little. He doesn’t know about tracking apps on cellphones? Were it not for the assistance of Isabel and her psychic visions, Alex would get nowhere. Don’t get me started on how the use of paranormal elements is just a cop-out!

The perspective of the killer is included. Though he remains unnamed until late in the book, we learn about his difficult childhood. I appreciated that the villain is not portrayed as totally evil, but his motivation becomes weak. His first killing has a strong personal element, but the more recent attacks are less convincing in terms of motive.

Then a lot of random characters are added to serve as potential suspects. Ah yes, here’s another Settlement enactor. Though considerable background information is given about these secondary characters, I found little to differentiate them in terms of personality. It was difficult to keep track of who was who, though the person who first becomes a suspect is so obviously a red herring as to be laughable. Some of the characters, like the insufferably obnoxious ex-wife and the arrogant FBI agent, are just stereotypes.

There are many scenes which, for lack of a better word, I’d call fillers. They give a lot of information that has little to no relevance to the investigation. It almost seemed like the author needed to make the book longer and so bogged it down with extraneous details. This approach adds to the slow pace but certainly does not add suspense. Only its climactic “will the next victims be rescued in time” scene has any real suspense.

This novel just felt flat. Its plot is unremarkable, though the graphic violence seems to be intended to add a gruesomely creative aspect to the ritualistic killings.  For me, the book just seems scattered and unfocused, its thin plot padded with irrelevant details which serve only to distract.