Murder Road (2024)
By Simone St. James
Berkley/Penguin Group, 352 pages.
★★★
Canadian writer Simone St. James is known for paranormal thrillers in a nouveau Gothic style. Her latest, Murder Road, takes us to the shores of Lake Michigan in 1995. Newlyweds Eddie Carter and April Delray are heading for a honeymoon on the cheap. He repairs cars and she works the snack bar at a bowling alley, so there’s not much cash to throw around.
Theirs is also a get-acquainted trip as they got married just six months after meeting. He’s an Iraq vet suffering from PTSD, though April seldom sees signs of it, and he doesn’t know that Delray is one of several surnames April has had in her life. Her mother is supposedly deceased, but there's much Eddie has yet to discover about his bride. They are each in their mid-20s and, Eddie’s military service notwithstanding, have some growing up to do. But their giddy blue-collar desire for one another could have been yanked from a Bruce Springsteen song.
It's dark and pouring rain as they aim for Five Pines Resort, get off the interstate at the wrong exit, and find themselves heading for Coldlake Falls via Atticus Road. Why did Eddie turn his Pontiac onto this road? He's not sure, but it felt like it was the right way to go. Wrong! They spot of a sopping wet figure by the road who seems distressed. They offer her a ride, learn her name is Rhonda Jean, but must rush her to a hospital as she’s bleeding all over the backseat. On the way, a black truck appears to be following them, but it speeds away when they turn toward the hospital. April has time only to see a young woman with long hair glaring at her from the bed of the pickup.
Eddie carries Rhonda Jean into emergency room. As they tell the intake nurse what they know, police arrive and advise that Rhonda Jean has died. They also behave as if Eddie and April are suspects and when Quentin, a state police detective arrives, he treats them as murderers. The Carters–April hasn’t had time to change her name but assumes Eddie’s family name–are flabbergasted when ordered not to leave town and lodge them with a 40ish woman named Rose, who seems hostile to the police and the Carters alike. Eddie and April are cozy enough, if one overlooks the Princess Diana* memorabilia, but this isn’t exactly a romantic getaway.
The command to stay in town is one of several MacGuffins–a device that exists solely to service the plot–in Murder Road. Police cannot detain you unless they charge you and, had they done so, even a public defender would have sprung the Carters in a flash. But this is a ghost story, not a courtroom drama. As such, there are many things in the plot that defy logic. St. James fleshes out some characters–especially Rose–and leaves others more hazy. We don’t learn until the very end why Quentin is acting as if he's auditioning for The Fugitive, why the high school Snell sisters are obsessed with an Atticus Lane ghost legend, or why the lakeside camping spot of Hunter Beach is presented as a kind of hippies-meet-bikers-and-hipsters haven. It’s 1995, after all, so hippies would be anachronistic unless the MacGuffin served the book’s central device of unsolved murders along Atticus Lane. No concrete motives are present, though the Snell sisters think they are all linked to a ghost with unfinished business.
To make such a thesis feasible, St. James adds more MacGuffins. The Carters find an unexpected ally in Rose and, instead of opening Pandora’s box, the Carters’ independent investigations unearth vital clues of close encounters of the creepy kind. The novel’s resolution rests upon linked contrivances that stretch credulity.
It was refreshing to read a novel whose protagonists are not spoiled rich toffs, trendy bourgeoisie, or clingy Millennials. I also credit St. James for a story that’s scary enough, but not particularly bloody. If you can get past the MacGuffins and logic holes, Murder Road is a decent whodunit thriller. Still, one must fault St. James for violating Alfred Hitchcock’s dictum that successful MacGuffins require artful ways of hiding them. You’d have to be as clueless as the Carters to miss them whilst reading Murder Road.
Rob Weir
* FYI: Rose was not enshrining Diana, who was alive in 1995.
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