The Glister

A British town is dying from years of industrial pollution by the factory that once provided the economic lifeblood for the community. John Burnside's novel uses the dying town as a backdrop for an insidious mystery involving the ritualized murder of young boys. Narrator John Lee expertly translates the story of the dreary, doomed village to the spoken word. His Scottish accent only adds to the foreignness of the world that Burnside paints. With Lee's mesmerizing delivery the story slips from one character to another as easily as it slides from the past to the present. This is a book you won't be able to turn off as you search for the thread that connects the mystery. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

November 24, 2008
In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside (The Devil's Footprint
) delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life. In recent years, five teenage boys have disappeared from the coastal village of Innertown, where an abandoned chemical plant deep in the forest is slowly poisoning its rapidly declining population. The official line is that the missing boys are seeking a better life away from the town whose “sole business is slow decay.” A 15-year-old lad, who's found solace in books and foreign films that he can barely understand, is determined to find out what happened to his friends and why the town's lone cop spends so much time in those tarnished woods. Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the “expectation of failure” is rampant. While the ending feels hurried, Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind.