Reconstruction
Non-series
Mick Herron
Soho Constable (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-56947-504-0 (1569475040)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-504-1 (9781569475041)
Publication Date: April 2008
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): When a man with a gun breaks into her school, nursery
teacher Louise Kennedy knows there’s not likely to be a happy
ending ... But Jaime isn’t there on a homicidal whim, and is as
scared as the hostages he’s taken. When an armed police presence
builds up outside, he’ll only talk to Ben Whistler an MI6
accountant who worked with his lover, Miro.
Miro’s apparently gone on the run, along with a huge sum of
money. Jaime doesn’t believe Miro’s a thief – though
he certainly had secrets. But then, so does Louise, so do the other
hostages; and so do some of those on the outside, who’d much
rather Jamie was silenced ...
Review: British author Mick Herron’s sterling fourth novel, Reconstruction,
is a chilling recounting of every detail of every parent’s worst
nightmare – the seizure of a nursery school by an apparently
crazed, gun-wielding terrorist. The story’s an often frightening
look at the lives of the protagonists, from the teen-aged gunman, to
the courageous teacher, to the father with the twin tots struggling to
make sense of it all, to the misanthropic cleaning lady, to the MI6
accountant turned field agent, negotiating with the kidnapper and
fending off a troubled, itchy-fingered sniper, an apparently ruthless
colleague and several nervous cops caught in jurisdictional scrambles.
As much a rear-view-mirror analysis of the psyches of the players as a
recollected presentation of the facts of the case, the novel turns into
a galloping action-packed, psyche-probing read with a surprisingly
mind-blowing ending about who is guilty and of what.
In Herron’s complex story everyone is a reconstructionist, either
of their own baggage or of other people’s lives or of the events
around them. Herron, of course, is the master of the reconstruction,
retelling the specifics of the day long siege, getting inside the skins
and brains of his characters, and having them compare and contrast
their recollections of the current “flap” or of past
“incidents” so as to tighten the tension or muddy the
memories of the mysteries. There’s the mystery, for example, of
who the teenaged gunman, Jaime Segura, is, why he was running from his
two cop-like pursuers, how he “slipped their digital
leash,” and why he ran to the South Oxford Nursery School in
search of “the Lady.” And who is “the Lady,”
and why did he think she could help him? Then there’s the mystery
of why Eliot Pedlar with his “Memory” and his twin boys,
Gordon and Timmy are at the school early when only its
second-in-command, Louise Kennedy, is there regretfully musing over
“the incident?” And why is the school’s cleaning
lady, Judy Ainsworth, “in her daily mist of complaint,” and
rummaging through Louise’s office desk when Jaime traps them all
in the nursery’s windowless Annexe? Then, there’s
Jaime’s plea to the assembled police for help from a secret
services department accountant, Ben Whistler – why an accountant
instead of a police officer? And what is Louise’s reason for
returning so quickly to the Annexe after warning incoming parents and
children away from the danger? Just as importantly, there’s the
mystery of Whistler’s gay accountant colleague, Miro Weiss, and
his disappearance, allegedly with a ”missing quarter of a billion
pounds” from the Iraqi Reconstruction funds overseas.
Mysteries and secrets surround other characters as well, and their
lives are also intriguingly reconstructed. A sniper’s recollected
earlier experiences, for instance, add to the uncertainty of the
possible outcomes for the current “flap.” So do the past
circumstances of the British secret service spook and “Head
Dog” known as Bad Sam Chapman whose partner died trying to
apprehend Jaime in a “collect-and-comfort” operation gone
terribly wrong. Bad Sam has been doggedly pursuing the teenager ever
since, interviewing all kinds of people, trying to reconstruct
Jamie’s hidden connections to his lover Miro, to Whistler, even
to Louise. And as some people cross paths and others cross swords,
there’s a heart-pounding fluctuation between hope and despair for
the safety of the hostages and the capture of their kidnapper. But
that’s a final resolution to the long day’s reconstruction
best left to be read in Mick Herron’s spellbinding novel.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of Reconstruction and to Soho Press for providing a copy of the book for this review.
Review
Copyright © 2008 — M. Wayne Cunningham
— All
Rights Reserved
Reprinted with Permission
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7867-2068-2 (9780786720682)
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ISBN-10: 0-7867-1467-0 (0786714670)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7867-1467-4 (9780786714674)
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Reconstruction
Soho Constable (Hardcover), April 2008
ISBN-10: 1-56947-504-0 (1569475040)
ISBN-13: 978-1-56947-504-1 (9781569475041)
Omnimystery keywords for Reconstruction ...
Location(s) referenced: Oxford, England.