First published 2022. Amazon paperback, 2022, pp 269, c.70,000 words.
Fundamentally this book is a celebration of friendship, couched in an amiable thriller/who-done-it. It is the fourth ‘Jon Ball’ story and it concerns a woman who went missing, last seen at the Oxford University Press where she was cleaning up after a book-launch party. Jon is ex-army and now a freelance undercover operative who does surveillance work for the state, on or off the record. The missing woman’s friends try to recruit their friends to help investigate because the police are unsurprisingly uninterested. Jon’s girlfriend, Marandellas, a budding TV personality, thinks she might be able to make a documentary around the investigation. More friends are called in to help with that. The group go rushing around the country, interviewing friends, family and colleagues of the missing woman.
There is a nice build-up of tension in the base plot. Alongside it we get glimpses in the pain and pleasure of being a TV celebrity and beautiful woman, how tedious TV programme production can be, paranoia and hysteria in government circles, notably around Brexit, when it is hard to know who to trust, who is on which side, what is official and what unofficial, and if one is being set-up to take the fall or on some legitimate investigation.
Most of the people interviewed are low down the pecking order, suspicious, but fundamentally decent, but not beyond a bit of money grubbing. Anyone high up is usually stand-offish, pompous, or in some way unpleasant. Hopper is much better at the low-lifers than the successful.
Hopper writes well, making for easy reading. The characters are engaging and the plot mostly carries the reader along. However he beats the ‘Remain’ drum in the Brexit debate quite intrusively, although often amusingly. Most of his principle characters live in or around Salisbury and he paints a picture of the literary scene there, which is a distraction from the story. Those who attend Poetica in Salisbury will recognise many of the thinly disguised secondary characters, including Hopper himself (Big Ed).
Hopper is very good at and honest about the male gaze. Even though Jon’s girlfriend is beautiful and sexy, he can’t help himself looking at other women. A short security guard is amusingly pervy. An older man likes older women, although is not unaffected by a pretty young woman. Sexual attraction is an undercurrent in many human interactions here. Linked to that is the price to be paid for fame, tempered with its ego stroking rewards.
Hopper might sell more books if he killed his little darlings, but as his instincts are similar to mine, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Cosy crime it may be, but it is absorbingly told, and one is left with a warm feeling about good-hearted friendship.
Biography of Hopper from his website: https://colwellhopper.com/about/
Others’ reviews of the book: (I haven’t been able to find any, even on Amazon.)
© William John Graham, August 2024