re:mote voices

Title: Tell No One
Author: Harlan Corben
Publisher:Orion

Think about it.

You meet the love of your life when you are 7 years old.
You go through each step of exploration, of development together.
Your first kiss when you are 12.
You test your relationship by going to different universities.
You get married at 25.
You go out to the family holiday home to celebrate the 13th anniversary of that first kiss.
You are knocked unconscious.
Your new wife is brutally murdered.

8 years later.
An email arrives it takes you to a webcam.
You are looking at a random street.
A woman steps beneath the camera.
Then she looks into the camera.
It is your wife.
Who you thought was dead for 8 years.
She mouths the words “I’m sorry”

For me, that is a hook. The mix of the set up and knock down, with the real contemporary feel of that hook coming from the web cam. The inclusion of this kind of technology is one of the things that attract me to thrillers and is something that is cropping up in a whole range of work. Paul McAuley’s Whole Wide World featured the death of a girl transmitted live on her webcam. Michael Marshall’s The Lonely Dead includes a woman tracked through her webcam and murdered. And Michael Connelly’s Chasing The Dime sees a man drawn into events surrounding a missing prostitute after he is given the number published on her website.

With Tell No One Coben sets a whole stream of events into motion as a result of this one email. More bodies are found, and the FBI are investigating the lead character for those deaths, and for that of his wife. The result is one of the best thrillers I have read recently.

Narrative tricks are always something I find curious – the effects they have on how the plot develops. The kind of different insights they can provide, and how they are justified. In Tell No One the lead character narrates in first person through the first chunk of text, and throughout his sections. Secondary characters however switch to third person –this starts to provide the clues through which we start to piece together what is actually going on. In some ways this is a curious tool – I’ve started to notice that this kind of technique is common in thrillers, it does usually get explained by the lead learning about what else has been going on late – in this case that doesn’t seem to be as evident.

Working out what is going to happen in advance is possible, reflection makes the clues more evident, though the pace and structure does keep things going, so that you can become more involved than with some of the other thrillers I’ve read recently. With that it probably isn’t surprising that Tell No One has been licensed for cinema, with the film likely to be on release before the end of this year. In saying that, I am glad that I read it now, given the track record of Hollywood with adaptations.