A Blind Eye
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | A Blind Eye |
|---|---|
| Author: | G.M. Ford |
| Honors: | |
| Genres: | |
| Publisher: | Pan MacMillan |
In a shed outside their temporary shelter a shocking discovery awaits Meg and Corso: human bones—a lot of them—the grisly remains of Eldred Holmes and his family. A hideous crime undetected for fifteen years is about to become a top priority for the understaffed local law, who want Corso to investigate. His first move will be to somehow locate the one family member who escaped the carnage, Eldred’s wife, Sissy, whose skeleton is not among the others…and whose face has been neatly scissored from every picture in the Holmes family album.
With only eight days to solve a multiple homicide, Corso begins a hunt that will carry him halfway across the country and through a chilling history of violence, terror, and bloodshed that spreads from the small town of Avalon, Wisconsin, to the remote farmlands of New York State. And his single-minded pursuit will make Corso a marked man—the target of a rage- driven maniac, a master of cunning reinvention—as he draws closer to the shocking truth that’s hidden away in an isolated mountain community, where no law protects the innocent.
| Find it: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
Reviews
Amazon.com
Frank Corso already survived a defrocking by The New York Times, following his alleged fabrication of a major crime story. Having since re-created himself as a true-crime writer, he can ill afford to have his credibility questioned again. So when, in G.M. Ford’s A Blind Eye, he is subpoenaed to back up his book-selling boast about a Texas high-society murder, Corso disappears into the upper Midwest with his photographer (and former lover), Meg Dougherty—only to stumble onto one of the most horrific stories of his career.
Seeking shelter after an SUV accident in tiny, blizzard-racked Avalon, Wisconsin, Corso discovers the bones of Eldred Holmes and his sons shoved beneath an abandoned barn. Neighbors thought the family had moved away 15 years before; instead, its males had been murdered. Bargaining with Avalon’s sheriff to stay free of the Texas authorities, Corso agrees to investigate these killings. The solution may lie with Eldred’s wife, Sissy, an exotic seductress whose skeleton isn’t among the pile, and whose deliberately obscured—and bloody—trail leads the author and Dougherty to a slain nun in Pennsylvania, a family-destroying fire among isolated hill folk in New York, and a desperate, deadly ambush in northern Michigan. It doesn’t take the rangy Corso long to realize that he’s dealing with a protean and controlling killer, immune to remorse.
Ford is adept at dribbling out the sort of revelations that build fictional suspense. He enhances that with a mordant wit, oddball secondary players, and a protagonist whose gruffness is infrequently but intriguingly undermined by a warmth born of loyalty. Yet A Blind Eye, for all of its gripping darkness, pales beside its predecessors, Fury and Black River. The super-secret information source to which Corso turns here whenever he loses his quarry’s scent is a contrivance beneath Ford’s talents. And the assassination of an Avalon deputy, for which Corso is held responsible, is a complication with little purpose and no satisfactions. Fortunately, this book’s chilling close makes the whole thing go down easier. —J. Kingston Pierce
—
A Blind Eye dumps G.M.Ford’s crime journalist hero Corso in a mess of his own making, and shows him proceeding to make it worse. On the run from Texas Rangers who want to lock him up as a material witness over evidence he no longer has, Corso and his photographer and ex, Daugherty crash a car in a blizzard and end up taking refuge in a derelict farm-house. Corso’s luck being what it is, he finds the farmer and his teenage sons wrapped in plastic in the barn, and a family album with their wife and mother carefully scissored out of every photograph. Framed for the death of a local deputy sheriff, Corso needs to clear himself, but gets far more involved in uncovering a series of deaths that no-one in authority had even noticed, that had their roots in an isolated rural community three decades ago.
This is a powerful and convoluted plot which spends much of the time teetering on the brink of the preposterous; Ford is as much of an extremist as his hero in his bad attitude to the official forces of law enforcement and the pieties of investigation—Corso is an intuitive investigator as much as a solid pursuer of the details of legwork. The prickly relationship between Corso and Daugherty, a very angry woman indeed, is developing into one of the more interesting affairs in current crime fiction. —Roz Kaveney
