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
Have you read Reconstruction? How would you rate it?
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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)
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Omnimystery
keywords for Reconstruction
...
Location(s) referenced: Oxford, England.
