Grist Mill Road

great book

The novel starts explosively with Matthew tying thirteen year old, Hannah to a tree and shooting at her with a BB gun whilst twelve year old, Patrick, looks on - but cowardly, does not intervene. His cowardice taunts him through the years.A chapter later and after 26 years, we are in 2008 with grown up Patrick having married the traumatised and injured Hannah and both are now living in New York. What has happened in the intervening years? The edges of the puzzle are constructed first and now we begin to piece together the harder middle bits.Tension builds and we are never far away from the latent brutality, blood and torture with which this novel commences. Whether it is Hannah celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary wearing a bloodied steak round her chest or the story she covers as a crime reporter about a man killing his boss in broad daylight after he was sacked from work (the fantasy that Patrick imagines after he himself has been let go). Just when you think you understand the characters and events as they unfold, then the novel twists and shakes those beliefs as events are narrated from different perspectives.The novel is fast-paced and exciting. I could not put it down and did not have a clue where it would meander and take us. Fabulous!

As the strapline on the front cover of this novel suggests, this is a tale where "everyone knows what happened there [but] no one knows why." The opening sequence then allows us, the reader, to find out what happened. Patch, Matthew and Hannah have all gone to the woods; Matthew has sent Patch away, to leave him with Hannah for a while. When Patch returns, he witnesses something horrific. Matthew has tied Hannah to a tree and is shooting her with a BB gun. One of the shots hits her eye. Patch stands, watching, counting how many times Matthew takes a shot. These are the facts that we are offered; the novel then takes us along a fairly twisty path, allowing us to understand why this event happened.As the opening sequence suggests, this is a novel which is particularly dark. The violence of the act is visited a number of times throughout the novel, but there is violence and harrowing scenes away from this act as well. As with many other thrillers, the story goes back and forth between the time when the incident took place, in 1982, to the present day, which in this case is 2008. Also, like many other thrillers, we are also able to hear from the 3 individual characters' perspectives. So, is the twisty path that Yates takes us on worth the journey?Overall, I would say yes. This is a hard book to read, for different reasons. One niggle that struck me quickly was the lack of speech marks for the dialogue. It is not something that I have come across a lot before, so I personally found it quite irritating. For me, it interrupted the flow of the book, as I sometimes found myself reading a paragraph, only to then realise that a character had started speaking, but it meant that I had to go back to the start of the paragraph to read it properly. It's a little thing, but it really grated on me. The violence in this novel also made it hard going. To read about children being subjected to violence is particularly harrowing, and it is something which will linger for a while now that I have finished the book. It was also difficult to witness the deterioration of one of the characters, as they struggle with their mental health, and their conscience.At the heart of this book is the question of whether guilt should only be applied to those who commit certain acts, or whether the act of doing nothing also makes you guilty of something. In a sense, the ending of the book was inevitable. Yates has left it with a level of ambiguity, not completely drawing the line under the action for us, making us wonder what happened. The clues are there, you will come to your own conclusion. What is perhaps more certain though is that the events in "Grist Mill Lane" will stay with you.

It’s August 1982 in Roseborn, New York state. 12-year-old Patrick McConnell (the son of the ambitious local District Attorney) and his best friend 14-year-old Matthew Weaver (a kid from the wrong side of the tracks with a deadbeat, abusive father) have trekked up the Swangum Mountains with 13-year-old Hannah Jensen (the daughter of the richest family in town, who own the local cement plant). Matthew sends Patrick away on an errand and he returns to find that Hannah has been tied to a tree and Matthew is shooting at her with a BB gun. By the time Matthew has finished, Matthew has shot out Hannah’s eye. Patrick witnessed it all.It’s 2008, New York city. Patrick and Hannah are married and live in a luxury apartment with a view of Time Square and the Empire State Building. Hannah works as a journalist covering the city’s crime beat but Patrick has just been made redundant from his data analysis job at financial firm and while he looks for a new one, he works on his cooking blog and dreams of setting up his own restaurant. And then one day Patrick gets a comment on his blog, offering him lunch at a very exclusive restaurant run by a chef who Patrick admires, to be accompanied by a business proposal. Only the admirer turns out to be someone from Patrick’s past and suddenly, everything that’s recently happened to him starts to make an awful kind of sense …Christopher J Yates’s debut literary thriller examines the events leading to a childhood crime and its ramifications from the perspective of each protagonist with pacing sacrificed for character development which is unfortunate as I found them little more than stock caricatures whose decisions solely serve the plot and were therefore difficult to relate to while the plot itself is predictable and a little trite so it never really engaged me.For me the big issue with this book is the predictability. Although Yates works hard on each of the trio’s backstory (and I did enjoy Hannah’s wry, slightly self-mocking section and the way she acknowledges her own privilege). However the decisions that each makes is clearly there to move the plot on – most notably in Patrick’s section where I didn’t buy into his rationale for what he thinks is happening, especially given the length of time that’s existed since seeing Matthew and his lack of curiosity in having any kind of meaningful conversation with him. This is all supposed to add to the tragedy of the ending, but for me it was just irritating as it makes the finale seem quite thin and artificial (and the same can be said about a key exchange between Matthew and Hannah where there is literally no rationale given for why Hannah thinks she saw what she saw and which, based on Matthew’s point of view of the same scene, there’s no justification for the accusation). I also found it very difficult to believe that Hannah and Patrick simply never discussed what happened to her, given that the event cast such a shadow over each of their lives.There are some well done scenes in the book – I particularly liked the relationship between Matthew and Pete that’s part father-figure, part crush and which Yates handles with sensitivity. Certainly it’s the most emotionally real relationship in the book, in part because of the tone in Matthew’s narration as he looks back on how he came to terms with his sexuality. Also good are the scenes between Hannah and McCluskey (a New York detective she’s friends with) as the dialogue cracks with banter and warmth and I believed in his protective feelings for her far more than Patrick’s.Ultimately, I just didn’t think that this book had the character depth or the tight plotting I generally look for in thrillers and as such, while it’s not a bad read, it wasn’t a gripping one either and I wouldn’t rush to read Yates’s next book.

It's 1982 and three teenage friends go off to Swangum Mountains in the sunshine for a day trip. What is just another summer day turns into a nightmare and by the end of the day the most horrific crime has been committed and the lives of Matthew, Patrick (Patch) will be changed forever. I put the book down at the point and felt I could not go on with the story but then curiousity got the better of me.Fast forward twenty years and the three meet up again and the ramifications of that fateful day in 1982 are evident in each one of them and have impact d on their present lives. The three have a voice in the book and the after effects and memories of that day are different for each of them. Their demons never leave them but the truth will come out in the end.A complex and compelling thriller which whilst not normally my type of novel this is a page turner that is worthy of five stars if only for its jaw dropping plot. My first book I have read by this author but I will definitely read more. Not for the faint hearted.