Fiction Reviews
The Murder Road
(2024) Simone St. James, Michael Joseph, £16.99, hrdbk, 360pp, ISBN 978-0-241-67818-3
Resisting the urge to start this review with a series of Thunder Road/Tobacco Road/Telegraph Road jokes, The Murder Road is a supernatural thriller set in Michigan in the early 1990’s. Newly-weds Eddie and April – outwardly your typical American sweethearts, but one is a veteran of the first Iraq war with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), the other an escapee of an abusive childhood – are on the road heading for their honeymoon resort.
Driving late at night, they take a wrong turn and end up on a rural road where they pick up a young woman, severely injured and in need of help. She dies at the hospital the next town over and all of a sudden Eddie and April are murder suspects helping the police with their enquiries and forbidden from leaving.
But there’s more to it than that. They swiftly learn that this is not the first unexplained death on that road. Who was driving the mysterious truck that followed them that night? Who was the girl in the back? And why do the drop-outs at the nearby beach say that if you see the 'Lost Girl' then you die next?
Eddie and April, however, are a resourceful and determined duo. Knowing that the police are trying to finger them for the killings, they set out to prove their innocence themselves. And it turns out that whatever ghostly presence is there outside of town doesn’t want to let them leave without a resolution either.
Let it be said that I quite liked The Murder Road. Police procedurals and murder mysteries – ghosts or no ghosts, are not my usual book of choice – but this one knows what it is trying to do and does a good job thereof.
The aesthetic on display here could best be described as ‘knowingly traditional’ – we have for example the fully realised small town setting and the hard-faced detective trying to browbeat April into a confession but who also knows much more about the weird side of this case that he’s letting on, And of course Eddie and April, who are ostensibly Brad and Janet-adjacent but also much more than that.
St James knows her stuff here and it’s a perfectly believable genre exercise done well, with the usual twists, turns, false suspects, and inexplicables ultimately made explicable. It’s not gratuitous in its shocks or violence, but it does have a vibe and it does it well. And this is St James’ ninth novel, so you’d better believe she knows what she’s doing.
It does very much sit on the thriller side of the invisible genre boundary, however. It’s not combining a police procedural or detective story with fantasy tropes, nor is it interested in suggesting a wider supernatural world beyond the realm of the story (a temptation no fantasy writer would be able to resist).
It is, in other words, what it is. I would want this story to do other things, but The Murder Road is to recommended to people who are not me, of whom I generally find there are a great many.
Tim Atkinson
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