All the Things You Are

Declan Hughes' Ed Loy series was a good-quality PI series set in Ireland, which always seemed to capture the tensions between different sectors of Dublin society. Like plenty of British and Irish authors before him, Hughes feels the need to set this standalone in the US. Not all readers see that as a recommendation, although it may of course win him American readers who don't like to stir too far from home!

It opens in cracking style. Clare Taylor's mid-life crisis appears to have come early, and she takes off to Chicago for a week with her ex. She's frustrated that she never made it as an actress, but returns to her life as a suburban mother in Madison, Wisconsin. Except, when she gets home, her house has been stripped, her husband and daughters are nowhere to be seen, and the family dog is dead in the back garden. And worse is to come – the family money appears to have disappeared, and one of her husband Danny's schoolfriends is found dead out the back.

All the Things You Are focuses on Halloween, 35 years apart. Four boys are inseparable at school. But there is unpleasantness and bullying around, and a family is killed in a blaze after a Halloween prank goes wrong. When the action fast-forwards to the present day, nothing and no one are as they seem.

It's a gripping book, in that the plot pulls the reader along, but curiously uninvolving in some ways. Hughes drip-feeds information, and there are a lot of time changes. It's not helped by some very odd stuff going on with tenses as well.

The plot performs stall turns, but the characterisation seems to suffer as a result in that it's difficult to form any attachment to any of the characters or, indeed, be that fussed what happens to them. All the Things You Are moves into Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay territory but is stylistically miles apart – and worth reading for that alone. Kudos to Hughes for trying something different.