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Random House Australia/ William Heinemann, Oct 2006
Reviewed by Kerrie Smith
Mystery
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 a month or
two ago, 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.
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
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