Review: THE MURDER BALLAD, Jane Hill

This review was originally published elsewhere

Random House Australia/ William Heinemann, Oct 2006

Maeve O'Mara marries Trey Ferguson, American singer, session musician, and composer, a bare seven weeks after meeting him. One of the types of songs that Trey likes to sing are 'murder ballads', grim songs from Scotland and Ireland about people killing their loved ones, usually down by a river. By the day of their registry office wedding, Maeve still knows almost nothing about Trey, in fact has just found out what his real name is. Theirs has been a whirlwind and sexually-charged romance. So much in love is she, that Maeve is more than willing to leave London where she has lived all her life and go to America with Trey.

Almost immediately after the wedding, the newlyweds go to live in Trey's family home tucked away in the American Appalachian Mountains, in Bodie's Hollow. There, in the house that was Trey's grandfather's, far from her friends and family, Maeve uncovers secrets more than twenty years old. She realises that she is far from home, married to a man she barely knows, who has told her almost nothing about his past.

We know right from the beginning that, in marrying Trey, Maeve is moving into danger. THE MURDER BALLAD is written in the first person, through Maeve's voice. When she meets Trey she is emotionally fragile as she recovering from the death of her fiance less than a year before. Maeve tells us that she should have been more cautious, more sensible, and that much of the subsequent events in the novel happen because of misunderstandings.

There is an almost gothic feeling about this story. There is a sense of foreboding, of momentous events to come, in a setting which Maeve herself refers to as "a kind of Appalachian Brigadoon". This certainly assists in heightening the tension in the story

I reviewed Jane Hill's debut novel GRIEVOUS ANGEL, and while I enjoyed that, I regard THE MURDER BALLAD more highly. I think it is a better written book, the threads are more tightly intertwined, and the final resolution is not revealed until the last pages. Hill again uses a flashback approach to weave the story, but there is less extraneous detail for the reader to remember. Jane Hill is an excellent story teller.

My rating: 4.6

Jane Hill is the director of programming for an award-winning group of commercial radio stations in the U.K., and previously worked as a radio journalist. She lives in Lincoln, England.

November 2006 Review first published on Murder and Mayhem

Review: GREVIOUS ANGEL, Jane Hill

A review that was originally published elsewhere

Random House Australia, Arrow Books, October 2006

Eighteen years ago Justine Fraser was on the verge of marrying Nicky Bennet. She and Nicky had first met when she was on a three month exchange at Lowell University in New Hampshire. He quickly became the love of her life. Justine was a literature exchange student from England. After her exchange Nicky and Justine lost touch until he turned up two years later in England, proposing marriage within hours. Then eleven days later he left.

Now the newspapers are announcing that Nicky Bennet, film megastar, has disappeared. Justine, leading a very quiet life working in a bookshop in a seaside English town, immediately knows she has go to America to find out what has happened to Nicky.

Justine realises that in fact she knows very little about Nicky, and some of what she had accepted as fact was actually fiction. Justine's initial homesickness at Lowell University made her very willing to accept sexual overtures from Nicky. She made few friends, and readily accepted what Nicky told her about himself. Now, nearly twenty years later, she is still convinced that what they had was true love. Her attempts to trace Nicky in America reveal another interpretation of their relationship.

GRIEVOUS ANGEL is a poignant exploration of a young woman s experience. Most of the time Justine can see Nicky as a 'pretentious poser' but when depression strikes, as it does quite often, she sees him as a 'lost opportunity'. Three years before Justine's American exchange, her older sister Marie committed suicide, and deep down Justine blames herself. For much of her life Justine has been depressed and insecure, believing that first Marie and then Nicky rejected her because of her social ineptitude. In a sense GRIEVOUS ANGEL is Justine's journey to truth. It did make me re-think the story of Justine's life and to take another view of her own understanding of what had happened to her.

GRIEVOUS ANGEL is many-layered, with information about earlier events revealed through a series of flashbacks. One of the problems for me was that there were facts revealed early that I didn't fully realise I would need to know later. This created a sense of deja-vu in the story as I struggled to work out why I already knew something. At times I did recognise that I had already learnt this fact, but now I had a better idea of its significance.

GRIEVOUS ANGEL is not strictly a mystery nor even a thriller, although there is the mystery of what has happened to Nicky Bennet. I am not sure what its true genre is, perhaps 'romantic mystery' if there is such a classification. There is violence, even a murder, but the central theme is how Justine Fraser has coped with what life has dealt her.

My rating: 4.3

Author Jane Hill is the director of programming for an award-winning group of commercial radio stations in the U.K., and previously worked as a radio journalist. She lives in Lincoln, England.

October 2006 Review first published on Murder & Mayhem