The Bridge

January 16, 2017
At the outset of Prebble’s tense thriller, a man suddenly starts throwing children from London’s Waterloo Bridge into the water below. In minutes, six people are dead and the man has disappeared into the crowd. No one can provide a description other than that he wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, like many other young men. CCTV cameras have little to offer. Near the scene is Michael Beaumont, an aspiring TV sound mixer. Michael is eager to introduce Alison Parsons, his new girlfriend, to his grandmother Rose, who lives in a nursing home in Battersea. When Rose first sees Alison, she starts to scream. Why? And why is Alison so evasive about her childhood? Finding the answers becomes critical when the police receive a message from the killer, who has since gone on to take other lives, leading them to evidence that ties Michael to the crimes. Unfortunately, Prebble relies on too many farfetched coincidences. Readers will hope that he avoids such tricks next time and returns to the form he showed in his first novel, The Insect Farm. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider/ICM.

January 15, 2017
A young couple discovers their budding romance has disturbing links to a string of crimes committed by a serial killer.Michael Beaumont falls hard for Alison Parsons the first time their eyes meet across a crowded pub in Brighton. By the end of the night, she--and the reader--knows loads about Michael (he's 20, works as a runner at a post-production studio in London with the hopes of making it in Hollywood someday, and was raised by his Grandmother Rose) while divulging very little about herself other than that she's a travel agent in Brighton recently back from a five-year stint in Australia. They're soon caught up in a whirlwind romance as London is gripped by a rampaging killer dubbed the Madman, who grabs random children and chucks them off bridges and piers. As the body count rises (Prebble has no qualms about knocking off the under-10 set), police scramble for leads. Back in lovebird land, Michael takes a big step and introduces Alison to Rose, who's in Greenacres care home after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The meeting goes poorly, with Rose shrieking rather than welcoming Alison with open arms, causing Michael to start wondering--as the reader has many pages prior--if his paramour might be hiding something. Somewhat predictably, Michael and Alison are drawn into the heart of the Madman investigation, which causes all sorts of secrets--some expected and some actually revelatory--to come to light in the all-out hunt for the killer. While Prebble (The Insect Farm, 2015) flounders when writing believably youthful characters, he spins an entertaining tale full of enough twists to gloss over this shortcoming.

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February 1, 2017
The instant spark between Michael Beaumont and Alison Parsons deepens when they share the stories of their deprived childhoods. He was an only child raised by his widowed maternal grandmother after his addicted mother took off, while sherecently returned to London after five years of living in Australiawas put into institutionalized care after her parents died in a car crash. But their time together is marred by serial killings by a person who becomes internationally known as the Madman, who snatches young children and throws them into a river or the sea. After the third such incident, Michael, who is increasingly disturbed that Alison is not being honest with him about her past, is arrested when circumstantial evidence points to his being the Madman, a situation that soon leads to uncovering information about both his and Alison's pasts. The strong bond between family members is key here, as in Prebble's debut The Insect Farm (2015), and, in both novels, what starts as a thriller becomes, after twists and turns, a more sensitive story about family relationships in the wake of unimaginable tragedy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)