The Diviner’s Tale

The Diviner’s Tale by Bradford Morrow has all the potential to be a quietly disturbing story. It begins with a diviner, Cassandra Books, who has been hired by a developer to search for water, or dowse, on newly purchased land only to come across a dead girl hanging from a tree. When she returns with the police, however, the girl has vanished and there is no sign she ever existed at all. Having grown up with a family of diviners, Cassandra’s sanity is further questioned by this turn of events. Only the next day, a missing girl is found in the very same woods where Cassandra’s vision occurred. As increasingly creepy occurrences begin, Cassandra begins to draw connections between current events and those which happened when she was only a child.

Unfortunately, despite its potential, The Diviner’s Tale is actually a fairly boring novel. The major problem is that Morrow constantly strays from the story and the bulk of the book is made up of random anecdotes while the reader never really has much opportunity to connect to the characters. Cassandra herself is pretty cold and removed, while her two young sons seem unbelievably charming and suspiciously uninterested in who their father is. I thought I was picking up a murder mystery, but in reality Morrow seems to forget about both murder and mystery for the majority of the book and instead spends most of the time contemplating life.

The language used by Morrow in The Diviner’s Tale is lovely and flows nicely, but it doesn’t compensate for the fact that the overly literary storyline leaves little incentive for turning the page. It is certainly not a book to be devoured and I often found myself putting it down, my attention drifting quite easily. Even two-thirds into the novel I was still waiting for the story to actually begin.

Ultimately, The Diviner’s Tale negates plot for anecdote and rich characters for the unfeeling or unbelievable. Sure, The Diviner’s Tale has all the potential to be a quietly disturbing mystery, but unfortunately the most mysterious part about it is how it manages to be over 300 pages without really saying much at all — at least it does so with nice language.

The Accident

Since I hate writing about disappointing books, I’ve also decided to share a novel that surprised me, in a good way, with its intelligent and exciting mystery: The Accident by Linwood Barclay. The story begins with Glen Carver at home, waiting with his young daughter for his wife, Sheila, to arrive. When Glen learns Sheila has been killed in a drunk-driving accident — one she was responsible for and which left a boy and father dead as well — Glen is both angry and confused. Sheila wasn’t a drinker, and she wasn’t even supposed to be out on the road where she died. Glen is soon pulled into the conspiracy that includes his friends, neighbours, and employees, one which has him doubting everyone he knows including the woman he was married to. Desperate for the truth and wanting to protect his daughter, Glen is determined to find out what happened to Sheila, even as it pulls him into a vortex of corruption, illegal activity, and mysterious killers.

I wasn’t planning to read The Accident, but when I ended up with two separate surprise copies, I decided to give Barclay, a Canadian author of domestic mysteries, a try. In fact, I started the novel on audiobook but halfway through I was so intensely involved in the story I had to pick up my print copy and devour the last 200 pages in one sitting. One of the aspects of The Accident that is so scary is the fact that all of what Barclay writes about happens in a seemingly normal and quiet American neighbourhood, but beneath the surface, evil of a suburban but dangerous nature brews. Barclay also takes one of our worst fears — that the person we marry will not be who we think they are — and explores it in a way that is both exciting and thought-provoking.

Barclay tells a smart thriller, one full of excitement but also contains a cast of believable characters with unexpected depth. The Accident is a riveting and well-written mystery, both timely and shocking in the issues it explores and with plenty of twists that will have the reader’s heart pounding to the last page.