Book Review: You Will Never Find Me
/You Will Never Find Me
'Maybe you don't know what it's like to love a child,' said Mercy. 'There's no choice and you don't have any control over it from the moment they're born. It's not like being with a guy and thinking, look at all the grief I'm getting from this arsehole, time to move on. The child is a part of you. It would be like walking away from the best part of myself. And now she's gone I don't feel, thank God for that, at last I've got some … what's it called? Me time, whatever that is. What I feel, Detective Sergeant Jones, is complete emptiness, as if the best love I've ever known has buggered off. And it's my fault. I'm the failure. She loved me.'
Both parents set about at once to find the daughter who doesn't want to be found, and Wilson's narrative is by this point already shifting between their corner of the story and the corner belonging to his book's hands-down most interesting character, a Colombian drug dealer nicknamed El Ossito, the little bear, a heavily-muscled and seedily charismatic killer who seems never at any point in his life to have been innocent. Even his warmest memories are steeped in blood:
Pig killing. La matanza. He'd been to a few in his time. Something human tremble on the outer limits of his mind as he remembered children running around the farm while the men, having killed the pig and bled it out, scalded it and scraped off the bristles, leaving a perfectly pink corpse. This they hung up by its hocks, and, as the pit was unzipped with a blade, the women went in and hauled out the guts into massive metal bowls. The dogs came skipping around, tails wagging, heads lowering, looking for a bit of generosity. The women turned away, blood-spattered from the clean, pink corpse, as if from a freshly murdered husband.
El Ossito quickly tops the list of suspects Boxer and Danquah hope might be able to lead them to their daughter, and Wilson so expertly complicates this plot with another kidnapping that after roughly page 35 there isn't a single dull or even static passage anywhere in the book. This is police-procedural writing elevated very nearly to Reginald Hill levels.“Who the hell are you?” a character asks Boxer at one point, to which he replies, “I'm an angry father.” “Right,” his questioner replies, “but you're not an ordinary angry father. You're very cool for an angry man. You're thinking clearly … clearly but dangerously.” It's to Wilson's credit that such a “clearly but dangerously” description could apply equally well to half a dozen of his characters, all of whom are etched to crisp perfection. The thousands of fans Wilson made with his fantastic novel A Small Death in Lisbon will find everything to please them here.
