Speak No Evil

Starred review from April 12, 2010
Waites’s brilliant fourth Joe Donovan thriller (after White Riot
) puts him in the same league as such established contemporary noir masters as Ian Rankin, John Harvey, and Denise Mina. When Mae Blacklock was 11, she strangled a boy to death in a fit of rage. The story, which made for lurid tabloid fodder, became a common reference point in Britain for juvenile homicide. Forty years later, Mae, now Anne Marie Smeaton, asks Newcastle PI and former journalist Joe Donovan to work with her on a tell-all memoir. Waites alternates between Anne Marie’s interview sessions and an increasingly bizarre series of crimes, in which first one and then two children in nearby communities are murdered. Donovan’s investigative team gradually uncovers a pattern of child killings over the years that appears to follow Smeaton’s frequent moves. Donovan’s continued search for his son, who disappeared six years earlier, at age six, raises the emotional stakes in this searing crime novel.

May 1, 2010
Joe Donovan turns his obsessive search for his kidnapped son over to co-workers while he interviews a woman with a story to tell. As a child, Mae Blacklock was sexually abused by her prostitute mother, her mothers customers, and her grandfather. Her powerlessness and anger caused her to kill an even younger child. Four decades later, shes free from prison but still paying the price, suffering blackouts, and living under an assumed name in shabby, violent estates. In each estate where shes lived, another child has died. Mae isnt sure that shes not a serial killer. Donovan must sort it all out. Waites seems prone to juggle one more ball than he should; he did it in Bone Machine (2008), and hes done it again here. Maes story and the vivid portrait of life in Englands urban estates are grisly and compelling. So are Waites musings on the price of powerlessness and on the power of family to strengthen or destroy, but Donovans abandonment of his obsession strains credulity. Still, the detectives fans will find the good outweighing the not-so-good this time around.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)