Will Grayson and Helen Walker Series by John Harvey
Will Grayson and Helen Walker #1
Gone to Ground
John Harvey
When police detective Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, their first thoughts are of an ill-judged sexual encounter or a fatal lovers’ quarrel: The man’s face was like a glove that had been pulled inside out. But they soon shift focus to the book Bryan was writing about the life and mysterious death of fifties film star Stella Leonard. While Bryan’s sister puts herself in danger by conducting her own investigation, Grayson and Walker peel away the secrets of a family blighted by a lust for wealth and power and by its perverted sexuality. On the heels of his critically acclaimed Frank Elder series, John Harvey delivers a page-turner both subtle and devastating.From Publishers WeeklyAcclaimed British author Harvey takes a break from his popular Charlie Resnick series (Lonely Hearts, etc.) with this well-written but unexciting police procedural. Stephen Bryan, a gay academic specializing in film studies, has been bludgeoned to death in his shower. Cambridge Det. Insp. Will Grayson and Det. Sgt. Helen Walker soon focus on Bryan's spurned lover, Mark McKusick, but the theft of one of Bryan's manuscripts, which deals with a 1950s film star whose great-niece is now one of the bad girls of British cinema, leads the detectives to wonder whether the professor's digging into the past led to his murder. While the solution is anticlimactic and the excerpts from a fictional screenplay add little to the plot or atmosphere, Grayson and Walker emerge as fully developed characters whose choice of career has taken its toll on their health and family lives. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review Along with his Frank Elder series, the successor to the now-classic Charlie Resnick novels, Harvey writes the occasional stand-alone. This one, set, like both of his series, in Nottingham, moves in a new direction for the multitalented author, whose usual milieu is the mean streets of the inner city, where poverty and racism breed crime. Here, on the other hand, he takes us behind the closed doors of the powerful, where closeted secrets rattle their chains until violence erupts. Two stories come together as police detectives Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigate the bludgeoning death of a gay film historian. Was it a crime of passion, or did the scholar’s current project, a biography of 1950s actress Stella Leonard, whose death mirrored the demise of the character she played in a celebrated film noir, somehow move the killer to action? The investigation proceeds, in typically detailed fashion, with the detectives fighting their way out of seeming dead ends while dealing with multiple personal issues; but this time the story has a new level, as Harvey juxtaposes flashbacks to the actress’ life and snippets from the script of her classic film. By doing so, that sense of inevitability, which is at the heart of film noir, re-creates itself offscreen, producing a frisson that drives the action, with past and present feeding off one another much in the manner of Ross Macdonald. More successfully, perhaps, than any other writer of a successful mystery series, Harvey continues to reinvent himself in novel after novel. --Bill Ott
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