Book review: Ava Bonney is not your ordinary 13-year-old. The teenager has her own “body farm” not far from her mother’s Birmingham home where she collects roadkill from the nearby motorway to observe their various rates of decomposition. She’s smart, secretive, wise beyond her years, a little feral and fascinated by the dark side of life.
That’s partly an escape from a difficult home life coping with a cruel, inconsistent mother and a leering stepfather.
“Ava knew already that, if she was to survive childhood … she had to make excuses, lie, keep secrets; keep her misery silent.”
One night while out exploring the area for recent roadkill she comes across the body of a school mate. She disguises her voice and calls the discovery in to police, but more bodies are to follow – all with the same distinctive human bite marks – and Ava begins her own investigations.
Ava’s character is apparently based on the author’s own childhood. “I am a dark-minded person … and I have always been this way,” Tierney said in a recent interview.
The novel began as an entry in a newspaper’s first novel competition and was subsequently sold to a publisher in a six-figure, two-book deal that enabled Tierney to quit her day job as a biology teacher and write full time.
For all its macabre and esoteric subject matter (and, yes, otherworldly creatures figure in the narrative), this is a pretty straightforward – and easy to solve – whodunit. It often reads more like a young adult novel than one for adults, despite its grim descriptions of decomposing bodies and the intricacies of skeletal anatomy.
The novel’s vivid depiction of 1980s Britain, however, especially the deprived area of Birmingham where it’s set, is well done, Tierney clearly drawing from personal recollections and the punk and pop culture of the period.
Also investigating the crimes is one Detective Seth Delahaye, a dry but dependable figure who treats Ava with respect despite her age. Indeed, he begins to rely on her expert knowledge – all self-taught – as the body count rises. It turns out he’s no match for the teenager when it comes to moving the investigation forward.
The novel has met with acclaim from the likes of Lynda La Plante, and Peter James, but to this reader it often felt overwritten and in dire need of a tighter line edit. One chapter begins: “The fine drizzle undulated in the street lights as Paul Ballow left The Longbridge pub with Lucy in a haze of ciggie smoke and spent lager.”
It’s an ambitious novel that perhaps promises more than it delivers, but you get the sense this is not the last readers will see of the precocious Ava.
Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney (Zaffre, $36.99) is out now.
