I read another Falling

Dedicated readers of this blog (a corps of people so exclusive I’m the only one in it) will remember a time a few months back when I referred to a novel I saw in the local post office by a crime writer named John Connor called Falling.

That was inspired by an even older blog post where I contemplated how the word ‘falling’ is uniquely suited to be in the name of books or movies, which explained why there are so many.

Well, I found myself standing in line at the post office again a few weeks back and there it still was. The sight of it made me realise that if some random book fan was in some shop somewhere on the other side of the world and my book was sitting on a shelf in front of them, wouldn’t I love to think they gave it a shot?

And so, conscious of the continued awareness about how much harder it is for a humble paperback to succeed nowadays in the face of so many more compelling and easy-to-digest media formats that don’t demand as much of a commitment in time, and knowing I’d be a hypocrite complaining about how nobody reads books anymore if I didn’t put my money where my mouth was, I picked Falling off the post office shelf where it had sat for at least a year, paid my $6.99 and bought it home.

It’s not a paranormal sci-fi fantasy about a major road thoroughfare collapsing and causing a mass haunting event. In fact it only serves to further cement what I’ve said about how powerful and ephemeral the word ‘falling’ is, and how it can refer to almost anything. Nobody really falls in the book at all, unless it’s referring to the heroine’s continuing descent into mental illness because of past trauma.

It’s a police procedural set in the contemporary north of the UK where either a terrorist, a serial killer or both have struck as racial tensions are threatening to boil over in the region, with various cops and detectives on the case.

I wasn’t terribly impressed overall (sorry John). The explanations that tied the various threads together became too convoluted and there were too many of them – I lost track of most of it by the end, and what I did understand I found kind of underwhelming.

It had one outstanding achievement, however, which was to follow the old axiom about putting your characters in terrible situations to test their mettle. The lead character, a female detective who’s dealing with trauma from a sexual assault and a professional disgrace that led to a recent suspension, is on the trail of the killer(s).

So she starts off in a very bad place, but while she works the case she also deals with estrangement from the daughter she loves dearly, intending to inflict a heartbreaking breakup on her partner, finding a new lover who brings her back to life before suddenly dying of a heart attack and much more.

She ends up following some dirtbag to his car outside a pub who’s promised to give her a lead on the case (I virtually yelled ‘don’t go out there, you stupid bitch’ at the page), gets taken hostage and finds herself tied up in a dingy basement while her captors discuss how they’re going to kill her.

If I had a self-mandated mission to read every book from recent times with ‘Falling’ or ‘Fall’ in the title I’m well on my way after TJ Newman’s debut air travel thriller, Neal Stephenson’s virtual world techno-drama and now this.

… but I still thought of it ages ago.