16 Horses by Greg Buchanan

If the marketing blurb on a book’s jacket is meant to sell copies then ‘…sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun’ is pretty good isn’t it?

The farm is located near a fictional seaside town – Ilmarsh – and features mainly two characters: Alec Nichols – a local police detective – and Cooper Allen a ‘forensic veterinarian.’ Before reading this book, I hadn’t realised that such as the latter role existed. After reading this book, I’m not sure how much of an insight into it I’ve really gained. I also didn’t really understand why she continued to be involved after her special expertise was sought as part of the initial investigation.

I suppose the book would be classified as ‘crime fiction’ but it is far more than that. It provides vivid, atmospheric descriptions of attrition, both of places and characters. All is stark and bleak and unforgiving.

It is hard to empathize with any of the protagonists who are as colourless as the landscape against which they operate.
I quickly lost interest in Cooper and, eventually, in Alec too. I did find them quite two-dimensional although the writer clearly tries very hard to make them much more than that: to add hidden depths, but we don’t really discover too much more apart from the obvious fact – established very early on – that these are not still waters.

I suspect that we are meant to believe there is a growing chemistry between the two and a kind of motherly fondness is shown by Cooper towards Alec. Whether this is meant as a metaphor for life’s general disappointment: despair, then hope, then resignation to the inevitable, I’m not sure. If not, then I don’t think it really adds anything significant to the story and, with no real development, feels like the reader is being cheated.

I like to read books where action and events and thoughts are taken out of chronological sequence. I also appreciate beautiful prose. I do believe that this is a well-written book, but with frankly not very interesting characterisation verging on tedium, and a plot structure that tries to be so much more than the eventual sum of its parts, I had to work much too hard for very little reward in the end.

If the words on the jacket cover had penetrated something truly deep and interesting, I could have lived with the fanciful style; however, for me, it felt like an opportunity missed. I was sadder about that than anything or anyone in the book itself.

I think that the writer was trying so very hard to be different that he lost the plot much too quickly.

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