Crash

Bunker 10 author, J A Henderson has produced another taut thriller, which compels from the first page. The novel begins with a stark scene on a trawler far out on a cold Norwegian sea. The Captain and two-man crew are uneasy: they’re carrying an illegal cargo and suddenly find themselves afloat in a sea of dead fish.

Things are about to go badly belly-up for teenage protagonist, Bobby Berlin, too. Cut to Bobby and his taciturn father on a train travelling over the river Forth – Henderson excels at the cinematic swoop – when a terrible accident occurs. A workman plunges to his death in the river and the train grinds to a halt. Bobby’s father, Gordon suffers a collapse and wakes with a peculiar form of amnesia (it later transpires that he’s convinced he’s a 14-year-old called Dodd Pollen). Cut again to Bobby’s eccentric – and only – friend in the tiny village of Puddledub where both live and we discover gypsy girl Mary Mooney cooking up a spell in order to contact her dead parents. The reader only needs to be introduced to Mary’s Romany grandmother, Baba Rana, who is strangely obsessed with the chimneys of the nearby Secron Ethylene Plant, for all the novel’s key elements to be in place.

The diverse narrative threads are skilfully interwoven, as the action proceeds in taut, gripping chapters in which suspense seldom lets up. Henderson plays his readers along teasingly with a theme of supernatural menace. The ghostly elements prove to be something of a deliberate red herring, but point up the author’s concern with identity and the pull of buried history. Essentially an environmental thriller with a spectacular climax, Crash cleverly uses drama to extend empathy: the eventual revelations as to Baba Rana’s wartime childhood in Germany are particularly poignant. Strongly recommended. Now for the film?