Book review: The Missing Activist, by Louise Burfitt-Dons
An often repetitive slow-burning private investigation story which explodes into an exciting thriller between about 92 and 98 percent of the way through the plot, before trundling to a close.
Although it is set within the world of a famous UK political party, written by an unsuccessful former candidate who knows the inside track, no real politics are included so it could just as easily have been composed about a ruling club in any other capital of the world. The issues are more along the lines of whodunit, can the insidious plot be foiled and what ties these events together? I didn’t guess who the murderer was and, even with hindsight, don’t expect many other readers will solve it before they are told either.
It is ‘modern’, in that it includes topical worries from the time it was written, zeitgeist stuff like institutional bullying and people inveigling their way into the school system and recruiting child brides for export to Isis jihadists. There’s also an older and more dismal trail about high-ranking politicians in their paedophile rings, sensu Ted Heath, which reads like a red herring dangling there but ties into the plot later.
There are several things I didn’t like about the book. The first was the overly slow build up, conversations and speculations, where the protagonist asks herself questions — which recap for the reader what they’ve read and already know. This self-questioning by the character threatens to wear out the question mark spring under the keyboard and, indeed, the author becomes so used to using their favourite button that (slightly beyond half way through) there’s even a direct statement that she’s added a question mark to from force of habit.
The book isn’t properly proof-read. You know how there are opening and closing speech marks for dialogue? Well, it looks like someone has done a bad ‘global replace’ in Word and that’s why there are closing marks (facing the wrong way) to open every quote. I noticed several incorrect spellings too, usually where the substitute word used is authentic in isolation and therefore would not be found by a spell-checker, e.g. when there are several woman instead of women, run a bell instead of rung. It’s always better to find these mistakes manually.
This could be a good holiday read for urban thriller fans, but I can’t say it won me over. Defining any book by what it could have been but was not (an action rollercoaster or House of Cards) isn’t fair to the author. I also have to acknowledge that there were some interesting moments, like the phone charger in the shopping centre, so I’d categorise this as a reasonable drama with some frantic tension toward the end — but this novel is one of many, lost in a crowd of titles written at this standard without enough gumption to elevate it.
