04 Jun 2013 03:47:05
The Devil and the River is Ellory's first novel since the "sock puppet" scandal hit last autumn. It's set in the 1970s, in the small town of Whytesburg, Mississippi, and follows the discovery of the corpse of a 16-year-old girl who disappeared 20 years earlier. Nancy Denton went for a walk in the woods in 1954 with the man she loved, a 31-year-old war veteran, and was never seen again. It was assumed that she was a runaway, but a fierce storm disturbs the riverbank in 1974 and her face emerges. "Just her face. At least that was how it appeared. And then came her hand – small and white and fine like porcelain – and it surfaced from the black mud and showed itself."
Nancy's torso has been sliced open, her heart removed, a coiled snake in a box left in its place. Sheriff John Gaines begins his investigation into the decades-old crime and finds a dark heart to this slice of small-town middle America, corruption running through the ranks of authority, secrets and lies and black magic snaking their way down every avenue he explores. "They had dug up the body of a teenage girl, but what else had they dug up? Had they released something preternatural, some malevolent force, some spectre of the past that would now forever haunt the streets and the spaces between the houses?" And then the body count starts to climb.
There's a lot going on in The Devil and the River. Gaines is a Vietnam veteran himself – "lately of the nine circles of hell that was Vietnam," we are told, (rather too) often. There are lots of flashbacks and musings on what war does to men's minds, some of which work, some of which – when Ellory gets too bogged down in spelling out specific historical details – just slow things down. People say "hell" a lot, and things like "it sure as hell is the weirdest goddamned shit I ever heard of" and "you really done fucked the dog" – this last to Gaines, when he makes a major error interrogating a suspect. The prose isn't, it has to be said, poetic and languorous, and one twist in particular is hopelessly obvious.
But for all that, The Devil and the River is lots of fun. Voodoo and murders and gothically imposing southern dynasties – what's not to like? There are moments of genuine chills, fearsomely speedy page-turning and real humour: "Are your murder investigations always this Shakespearian, Sheriff?" Gaines is asked after informing someone about the snake-in-a-box heart replacement and a later decapitation. Not a modern masterpiece, sadly for Ellory, but certainly an enjoyable summer read.
