The Bones of You

“The nicest people can have the darkest secrets.”

Tropes abound in this rather muddled novel about the murder of a teenaged girl in an English village.

First person narration can be a sticky wicket, inviting a high degree of self-consciousness in the narrator, a quality, which if taken to excess, can look a lot like self-absorption. These protagonists work best portrayed as engaging, witty, perhaps self-deprecating, ironic, wry, maybe with an axe to grind . . . And, in mysteries, it really helps if they are insightful. Howells’s primary narrator, Kate, exhibits none of these qualities.

Kate is not the only first-person narrator. We also hear from the murdered girl, Rosie, who speaks to us from the hereafter, delineating, in mercifully short entries, the atrocities visited on her by her parents. Tales of abusive childhoods work well when told without self-pity and with a modicum of drama. Some of Rosie’s entries, although poignant, are a shade beyond lavender. “. . . I’m the moth who sees the flame too late, leaving my wings charred and my body lifeless.”

Delphine, Rosie’s sister, makes rare and very brief appearances as the third narrator.

Rosie’s murder happens early in the story, before we get to know her and can establish any compelling reason to care that she’s been murdered. The death of a young person is always sad, of course, but Howells does too little in the ensuing 300+ pages to cause our grief to deepen over the death of this particular girl or, and this is more problematic, care who murdered her.

Kate, for reasons never made quite clear, becomes highly invested in the case and devoted to Joanna, Rosie’s mother. Kate’s daughter and Rosie were the same age, and Rosie used to like to hang out with Kate and her horses. But Kate’s interest in this case feels contrived. She tells us (and anyone else who will listen), repeatedly, that she and Joanna were close friends. But Kate is clueless about Joanna’s home-life, present or past, suggesting that their friendship was, at best, one-sided.

Kate, and therefore the reader, isn’t privy to details of the investigation, beyond occasional updates on which leading suspect has been brought in for questioning and then released. Months and pages drag on, and no one seems to be doing much to solve the murder.

Howells chose to tell her story in present tense, perhaps in an effort to increase the tension for the reader. Finally, when the case is cracked on page 309 of a 313-page book, Kate muses to a friend, “I still wonder how I didn’t see it.” Readers will wonder this, too, as it will have been crystal clear to most long before this point who done it, leaving readers to question why Kate is so slow and why Howells chose her to narrate this tale. Unreliable narrators are a time-honored tradition, but that’s not what’s going on here.

A challenge in present tense is that it offers characters little time for meaning making. If not handled well, the breathless immediacy of present tense can make characters look somewhat shallow as they guide us through scene after scene. Add to that the potential pitfalls of first-person narration, and you can end up with such blandly ruminative minutiae as this from Kate, “I frown, trying to make out who he is.”

Most of Howell’s writing is clean with one or two odd metaphors such as, “Lies are like dough or malignant tumors” that might cock a few eyebrows, but the marketing material that describes The Bones of You as, “A fantastically assured psychological thriller . . .” appears a bit overstated.