Translated by Robert Bonnono — There’s one feature of Swiss thriller author Joël Dicker’s new book, The Alaska Sanders Affair, that everyone can agree on: it’s very long. 532 pages in the version I read. After that, opinions are likely to differ.
The story itself, condensed to its essentials, is about the death of a beautiful young woman named Alaska Sanders – a Miss New England! – and the rapid identification of two suspects. One, her boyfriend, dies in police custody and the other, his best friend, who admits guilt because his lawyer told him to. If he went to trial, she explained, he would have faced the death penalty. The friend, Eric Donovan, has now been in prison 11 years and doubts are arising about the whole episode. Who really killed Alaska, and should Eric go free?
The narrative ping-pongs back and forth between events leading up to the 1999 murder in fictional Mount Pleasant, New Hampshire, and the new investigation started 11 years later by respected crime novelist Marcus Goldman and a New Hampshire State Police Detective, Perry Gahalowood. The two worked together to solve a case that turned into Goldman’s second book, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair. This book, which in real life Dicker did write, sold over a million copies and was turned into a television miniseries. In fact, it feels like you can’t go ten pages in the new book without hearing about the previous book or Harry. Harry is a literary lion whom Goldman reveres as a mentor, but only an incidental character in the new work. If those frequent mentions were intended to make me want to read it, they didn’t. I tired of it.
As to the development of the plot over the two main time periods, I felt a little like Stephen Leacock’s man who flung himself upon his horse and rode off in all directions. The chapters are mostly quite short and leap not only between the decades, but also among the numerous characters. At times I feared I was losing the main thread of the story because, whenever a new character is introduced, Dicker uses the next chapter to dive into that person’s backstory. Is this information important to the plot or not? Are these clues or is he just writing? I suspected that all of Marcus’s past romantic entanglements might not figure in the unravelling of Alaska’s story, and I was right.
An example was his repeated mentions of Aunt Anita, who’s dead, Uncle Saul in Florida, and two Baltimore cousins and their friend Alexandra. As children, they and Marcus were apparently close companions, but they have nothing to do with poor Alaska. Instead, we are teased with references to some undefined tragic circumstance, and it is now Marcus’s unacted-upon wish to rekindle his relationship with Alexandra. I had a strong feeling the author might be trying to build interest in some future book.
The small-town New Hampshire setting and its proximity to Canada, Boston and the Atlantic ocean works nicely with the plot. Descriptions of the characters, especially the two young women – the victim Alaska Sanders and her beauty contest rival, Eleanor Lowell – are, not surprisingly, devoted to how attractive they are. We don’t really get to know either of them very well or discover whether they have interesting depths.
All this aside, my main difficulty was the number of implausible circumstances. It doesn’t seem likely to me that the state police would reopen an investigation at the behest of a journalist and put him on the investigating team. It doesn’t seem plausible that the original investigation was so superficial that Goldman and Gahalowood can find a major reveal every 20 pages or so. How was all that missed in the first place? And yet practically every interview coughs up a twist, whereupon everything we have been told to date must be reinterpreted. This is not to say the police don’t make mistakes; they do. But so many, of so many kinds?
When the final reveal takes place, in the form of an almost unbroken dozen-page monologue, it once again reiterates the clues and puts them in their proper place in the puzzle. Yet, I couldn’t help thinking that some loose ends were still not accounted for. But it was time to turn the page – a phrase the author or the translator has inordinate affection for.
Also see Murder Under the Midnight Sun by Stella Blómkvist or The Revenge List by Hannah Mary McKinnon.
MacLehose Press
Print, Kindle
£9.99
CFL Rating: 3 Stars
