Country: Denmark
Genre: Crime/Thriller
Pages: 321
Order ONLY ONE LIFE here
The bone bus. Louis eshook her head. The nickname had stuck whenever people talked about transporting a body. In some cases it was highly appropriate, but in others it seemed more jarring. Such as now. They put the girl into a white-plastic body bag, and she was ready for transport to the forensics lab in an ambulance with covered windows. Impersonal and cold for a young girl, whose identity they didn't even know.
For a moment Louise had an urge to ride along with the girl so she wouldn't have to make the trip alone, but the vehicle wasn't like an ordinary ambulance with a seat for a family member.
Wanna know a funny secret about crime fiction? Violent and macho as it seems, women often write the best books. Megan Abbott, Patti Abbott (Megan's mom), Jennifer Hillier, Hilary Davidson, Gillian Flynn and Tana French are just a few names who dominate the charts and usually, for good reasons. Their fiction isn't cluttered with the need for dark, gritty heroes, obsessive gun play, meth labs and Batman worship. They just try to write the best stories they can, you know? The folks at Pegasus Books were kind enough to send my way a copy of Sara Blaedel's ONLY ONE LIFE. She's the crime queen of Denmark and they took on themselves to get her books translated and on the U.S shelves. Unfortunately, I don't think Sara Blaedel measures up to the best writers out there (including the five aforementioned). At least ONLY ONE LIFE doesn't and I'll do my best to try and explain why.
For starters, you need to know it's the third novel featuring her investigator Louise Rick. She's called upon a crime scene where a young girl has been found drowned. She's obviously from Arabic descent and soon enough they can identify her as teenager Samra al-Abd, whose family came in to the country four years ago from Jordan. The family is stricken with grief and yet their stories don't all add up. Rick and her partner Rasmussen suspect a honor killing, a terrible, terrible act that is unfortunately proper to Middle Eastern and Muslim tradition. Louise tries to investigate every possible angle before drawing conclusion. Samra's friend Dicta Moller, an aspiring model, seems be bearing a burden on her shoulders and Louise wants to know how it can relate to her investigation. But it's not always easy dealing with teenagers. It's hard to get them to even talk.
OK, the main issue with ONLY ONE LIFE, which all the smaller issues I had can be traced back to, it's that it's a one-dimensional novel. It has a main selling point, honor killing, and not much else going on for it. Now, I'll tell you a secret about myself. I unconditionally like Arabic people. It doesn't mean I'm against discussing horror killing because it needs a lot of discussing AND mainly practiced by Muslim people, but I strongly disagree with how Blaedel approached it. ONLY ONE LIFE is a third person narration and yet it doesn't ever take the al-Abd family point of view. Normally, I don't have any issue sticking with the law enforcement POV in crime fiction, but it means the suspects who don't have their side of the story told are automatically bad guys. I would have loved to see the difficulties the al-Abd were going through, the dichotomy between their new home and their tradition, the way the different people in the family reacted to it. In ONLY ONE LIFE, it's all filtered through the investigators' points of view and more often than not, they stopped at saying : "CULTURAL DIFFERENCE, DON'T UNDERSTAND" and it bugged the hell out of me. Honor killings are a social issue and if you're going to discuss it, do it properly.
She knocked quietly on the door and waited for Dicta to say come in. The room was large and bring with its own French doors opening out onto the yard. Several posters were hanging on the walls, but, considering the girl's aspirations of becoming a model, Louise was surprised there were no pictures of herself. When Louis asked about that, Dicta pulled a photo album off a shelf and flipped through the last few pages in it. Then she went to the closet and got out a box that was crammed so full, its lid would no longer stay in place without a rubber band.
"My parents don't know much about this," she explained as she opened the box and carefully spread the pictures out on the bed.
Interestingly enough, Blaedel's awareness of this issue seems to be growing as the novel progresses and it kicks into second gear about 180 pages in. The focus shifts on Dicta, Samra's best friend and she is Blaedel's most interesting creation. She has one foot in the murder investigation, but she's also wrestling with her own issues and is trying to build a life for herself. She's strong, responsible and thoroughly tormented. The modeling subplot was very cool, if a little straightforward. It would've been a strong complement to a better story. I wasn't familiar with Louise Rick before reading ONLY ONE LIFE, but I'm not much more now. It's a very plot-driven affair and most-often, Rick seems to be a vehicle for plot development more than a character with a complex personality. But that doesn't bother me too much. It's an aesthetic choice made by the author, to focus on the plot, rather than character. But the one-dimentional nature of ONLY ONE LIFE turned this into an issue. Plot-driven novels need to have a complex, ball-of-yarn-like mystery to solve.
It's a tall order to tackle social issues through crime fiction, because it's easy to let yourself parasite the equation. The best-achieved social crime story example I can give you is David Simon's THE WIRE. Everybody has a voice there. Cops, robbers, drug dealers, politicians (good and bad), kids and nothing is ever black or white. If you're going to discuss a social issues like honor killing, you have to expose both sides of the story. Arabic people are not sadists who kill their daughters for principle, they are human beings who are torn between their upbringing and a way of life that keeps changing faster and faster. I don't think ONLY ONE LIFE did a very good job at exposing the al-Abd family struggle. Ultimately, Blaedel is fair to them, but she doesn't represent them well. I didn't learn much about honor killings reading ONLY ONE LIFE. It was one-dimensional and yeah, a little shallow. Don't sell your Megan Abbott paperbacks yet, she's still the queen here.
TWO STARS