56 DAYS, a super-suspenseful story that wins on every level

56 DAYS
CATHERINE RYAN HOWARD
Blackstone Publishing
$19.99 hardcover, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.5* of five

A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY 2021 BEST BOOK FOR ADULTS RECOMMENDATION!

The Publisher Says: No one knew they'd moved in together. Now one of them is dead. Could this be the perfect murder?

56 DAYS AGO
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.

35 DAYS AGO
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests that Ciara move in with him. She sees a unique opportunity for a new relationship to flourish without the pressure of scrutiny of family and friends. He sees it as an opportunity to hide who - and what - he really is.

TODAY
Detectives arrive at Oliver's apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.

Will they be able to determine what really happened, or has lockdown provided someone with the opportunity to commit the perfect crime?

I RECEIVED THIS AS A YULE GIFT. THANK YOU, KIND ELF!

My Review: There’s always room for the thriller genre to expand. It’s been a generation since gay characters were allowed to live past the ending, as mysteries made their peace with us in the Brandstetter books; we’ve been promoted to sleuths! It’s been a generation, too, since heroines were normalized in the hardboiled end of the genre, with Sue Grafton’s damaged and flawless Kinsey Milhone.

But what hasn’t happened all that often, and what still feels surprising and fresh and fun to read, is the moral grayness of female thriller leads. They’ve been haunted; they’ve been vengeful; but they’ve either Done Wrong and Suffered, or Been Victims and Suffered. Isn’t that tedious? Isn’t that unrealistic? I know actual women, I know they’re (mostly!) neither Supervillainesses without a shred of conscience or Saintly Martyrs. They’re messy, muddleheaded people. They fuck up, they attempt to atone for it, they make awful mistakes and terrible decisions. They are, in other words, just...people.

Fiction hasn’t adjusted to the reality of women’s ordinariness. But Catherine Ryan Howard has.

Ciara Murphy is an ordinary, plain-old-folks, woman. She is about to turn herself into a pretzel of anxiety when we meet her because an impossibly handsome man has just Noticed Her and she isn’t able to believe that he’s actually behaving like a decent guy who’s just seen someone he wants to get to know better. That doesn’t happen between Adonis-like men called something as elegant as Oliver Kennedy and pleasantly plain lasses like her. Happen, however, it does:

And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t reavlize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

She wonders what that does to a person.

Nothing good, Ciara. Nothing good, and sometimes quite terrible things. As we’re all aware, there is male privilege and there is nothing good that comes from the possession of that plus good looks plus...though this is Ireland, and therefore the whitest of the white-people countries...white privilege. But Ciara’s white, too, and it’s time to face up to this book’s blind spot. Everyone in this story is a privileged and spoiled First Worlder having seriously First-World problems.

She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the door.

That said, we move on. And it’s where we move on to that makes 56 Days a deeply compelling, fully absorbing, surprisingly exciting thriller.

We know as readers that the purpose of a thriller is to thrill. Often that comes in the form of action, chase scenes, danger and blood and pain as Events Unfold. But this story is set on the brink of a worldwide pandemic and its uncertainty, its movement-restricting lockdown(s), its fear of others and its focus on somehow staying safe. But safety means different things to Oliver Kennedy and to Ciara Murphy. How much different is what what becomes so clear after the scene is set. They’re going to spend the lockdown cocooned together. This is, for reasons that are slowly and steadily brought into focus, something each urgently desires. They’re both unable to believe their luck, the way the world’s conspired to give them what the need the most.

They’ve been on a few dates. That, and some sex, and an undeniably mutual sense of their rightness of fit together, is what they decide when they’re forced by the pandemic to choose between lockdown apart and forming their own household. They each know they’re being rushed into this too fast; they each decide, for their own reasons, to make the lockdown into an opportunity to explore the new, strange-to-each sense of connection they’re experiencing. Neither decides to share their decision with others in their lives. I sure as heck wouldn’t, would you? Imagine the lectures, the sermonizing, the sheer next-to-panic worry the decision would evoke in a loving family member or even a very good friend. I’d be harping on the idiocy of thinking you know someone who’s barely even an acquaintance enough to spend two weeks of 24/7 days with them!

And now, I suspect there’s something you’re beginning to notice isn’t adding up. I’ve called this story a thriller. And it’s taking place in lockdown. A notoriously sedentary and isolated time. What kind of thriller are we going to get out of that? Just lots of sex, of discovery that Mr. Right is barely Mr. Right Now and Miss Congeniality is in fact vanilla ice cream with blue cheese dressing?

Author Howard has prepared a path for us that takes us into and back out of the past in several layers. The chapters are titled things like “23 Days Ago” and “Now” and the like. Each “Now” chapter focuses on the national police of Ireland, the Garda, investigating the discovery of a dead, badly decomposed body in a new, upscale apartment development. The lives of the senior investigating officers are sketched in but are done so in a way I found compelling and convincing. Like the senior officer getting a text from her junior that he needs her to come unlock him from the handcuffs his last lay left him hooked to the headboard with. We don’t get details. We do get some banter and some clues to the relationship she has with her foolish Sergeant.

What we also get is the certainty that we’re in good storytelling hands. In a chapter of under three thousand words we’re clear that she’s a good friend, a solid mentor, and he’s a foolish risk-taking adrenaline junkie with a great future behind him. They’re going to do everything they can figure out together to solve the puzzle of a dead person in a shower whose name they don’t know and whose life is so unmoored to anyone that the reason the body was discovered is the smell of it rotting bothered the people living in the same hall.

It is in these jump-cuts, these bits of time out of order, that the tapestry of awful crime and condign punishment play out. It is Ciara’s and Oliver’s story, as deeply intertwined and as messily disguised as each facet is, that keeps readerly fingers flipping pages. (Tapping them, in my case; this was a Kindle purchase using up 99¢ of a gift card.) As the points of view shift each time there’s a new date, more and more of the dead body’s tale of woes and wretchedness and unbearably poignant longing to explain and comfort and make things better comes into focus. There is never just one strand to the story. There is never just one angle of attack from which we’re approaching it, as Ciara and Oliver each reveal to the reader how few facts they’re revealing to each other. Every perspective shift offers a different story, both being told and potentially veering off from what has happened...there is a rotting body in a shower in an apartment.

It’s the why of it that is so gripping not the what. It’s the uncertainty that Author Howard uses to make us care...who is the dead person? Why are they dead? How and when did it happen?...over and over, on more and more layers of facts gleaned and fitted into the central puzzle of who the victim is. That answer is revealed as each layer of fact, each question answered, build the shape of the truth underneath the simple set up. A dead body is found in a shower by gardaí called to make a wellness check in a pandemic lockdown.

When all is revealed, as it is, the tense and frustrating ride is very much worth taking. It was never going to be exactly what I expected it to be, as I expected. After all, it’s a thriller. The point of the genre’s conventions is to go on a journey, to make one’s expectations go in ways the answer will not. As accustomed to that fact as I am, I was not expecting the resolution to the central mystery to take the final twist that it did. I’m not at all sure that it was the resolution, in fact; I can see Author Howard’s wicked little smile and devilishly quirked eyebrow as the facts she presents are snapped into a solid, firmly fitting pattern.

That isn’t at all the Truth. Unless it is. But it...really, honestly...might not be. It might be a shadow cast in a weird way by the always fickle Moon moving in its speedy course.

Lies are spindly, unwieldy things. Delicate filaments, like bundles of nerves in the body. Easy to twist, hard to control, impossible to keep hold of.

At the end of this story, Ciara Murphy and Oliver Kennedy are each deeply enmeshed in delicate, twisted filaments of lies told, believed, sold to a desperate self in need of something to hold on to. At the end of this story, there is no ending because the Truth can’t be packaged by being sculpted from facts. In the end, I think the best thrillers are the ones that obey the rules of evidence, that make sure you have facts that matter and are making the story make sense; this story does that at every turn.

Then it stands the facts on their spindly, delicate bundles, and shows you that the truth is you can’t be sure there’s any Truth in the facts. But there’s a thumping good read in them and a pleasure to be derived from their collection. (Just ignore the five (5) w-bombs.)