Black’s Creek – Dark and Brilliant

Black’s Creek by Sam Millar is a wonderfully dark crime thriller with a wonderful twist this is the noir genre at its best. This story is dark and haunting and thing of every parent’s nightmares when a predatory paedophile is living on the outskirts of the town. He is like the scary pied piper but worse and this is the story of his haunting the town like the worst of all evil characters.

Tom is a successful author living in New York having his breakfast with his wife as usual until he reads the New York Times’ headline telling of a crime that happened years ago in Black’s Creek was being reopened due to new DNA evidence. News that would make anyone jump for joy at the murderer finally being court. This is the story of three school friends, three children’s deaths and the investigation and murder of a paedophile.

Tom takes us back to when he was a teen with his school friends in Black’s Creek and how they spent one summer leading in to the following winter. While Tom was out skinny dipping with his friends Joey Maxwell commits suicide not able to cope with being a victim of Norman Armstrong, a paedophile whom the police cannot get enough evidence to take to trial.

Tom and his friends make a plan to kill Armstrong but fail to deliver on their plan through fear and being idealistic kids. They try not to talk about their failure and fall out. Tom falls in love with Devlin and they have a summer of love and she paints him naked. When Devlin is murdered Tom’s world falls to pieces and he wants to gain revenge on Armstrong who he blames. Somehow he gets acquitted when he eventually goes to trial and Tom’s world falls apart at the seams.

Tom and his father take the acquittal personally as he is the local sheriff and the town is pointing fingers at him. When a body is discovered in the local lake which the sheriff had searched a few days earlier a dead girl’s body is pulled out of the frozen lake, the sheriff is now a laughing stock.

Tom silently plans to kill Armstrong it becomes his raison d’être he feels that it is something that he needs to do. It is Tom who explains throughout the book what is happening and you can feel the darkness in his soul at this point in his life. It is also an example of you never forget your first love especially when Tommy looks at the picture Devlin painted of him so long ago.

This is a wonderful book a crime thriller noir at its best that is thrilling and seeing it through Tommy’s eyes as innocence is broken. There are some great twists in the book which deals evenly with the subject. Armstrong’s spectre looms large over the thriller as does the light of goodness from Tommy’s father. This is the classic page turning thriller which really is a must read from Sam Millar which proves he is Ireland’s master of the noir genre. ( )

Sam Millar Black’s Creek

This was a gripping tale that bounced along on a wave of adolescence angst and violence. Atmospheric, full of suspense and revenge. It reminded me of other books I’d read. Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones particularly the mother figure. I half expected Tommy to have to dig a hole in the garden when his mother’s wrath was working itself into a crescendo of suitable punishment. Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers, The Lovely Bones, or maybe it follows the fashion of having adolescent boys as narrators, The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Looking for Alaska. I felt, as they were characters I already knew but had become enmeshed in a new plot.
I am not a fan of violence. There are times when it is fundamental to the plot or the point the writer is trying to make. I did feel here that it was often gratuitous. And as such it was a joyless book in many respects.
However it was well constructed and well written, no real surprises in terms of the plot and the outcome. It is not an uncommon device to steer the reader into believing that one person is responsible for an action that was in fact perpetrated by someone else.
But it is how you arrive there that separates a good writer from a bad. And this is the work of a good writer. ( )