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Simon Kernick's RELENTLESS is a graduate of the One Damn Thing After Another school of thriller/suspense/call it what the hell you like school of writing. Tom Meron's a father of two who's never been in trouble. One Saturday afternoon he's out in the back garden adjudicating a spat between the kids when the telephone goes. On the other end of is an old friend, Jack Calley, who he hasn't heard from in ages. It takes a moment or two for Tom to realise that Jack is in trouble -- and is murdered as Tom listens. His final words are the first two lines of Tom's address. Tom grabs the kids and rushes over to his mother-in-law's house. He then goes off in search of his university lecturer wife Kathy -- and finds her missing and an unidentified corpse on her office floor. And from then on it's a helter-skelter race round the suburban Home Counties where the reader has to work out who's hiding what, who's telling lies, and who's worth trusting. In the end, though, I wasn't that fussed. The beginning is powerful, and thereafter the book goes through all the right motions, like someone learning to change gear, but it never clicks into that correct gear. It's all curiously unengaging. Unlike Harlan Coben, who's the master of Mr and Mrs Ordinary falling into some nightmare, Kernick never makes you care enough about Tom and Kathy. And in some ways I wish this had been a more traditional police procedural, as the characters of DI Mike Bolt and DS Mo Khan are more interesting. There is a loop left at the end which suggests this could be developed into a series. The book's not helped, either, by having a one-dimensional bad guy. And, oh joy, Kernick is one of those writers whose gay characters either end up dead, are man-hating lesbians or are figures of fun for homophobic sniping. And he doesn't seem able to write positive female characters either. RELENTLESS isn't an awful book; it's just rather flat. If you want to see this end of the genre done well, go for Coben's standalones every time.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, July 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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