Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd

I must admit a weakness for novels that use London as a strong and evocative setting. Vikram Seth's An Equal Music springs to mind as do several of the mysteries of P.D. James, maybe particularly Original Sin with it's venerable London publishing house set right on the Thames. I recall reading her early novel, Innocent Blood, before I ever visited the city, and I do know that a young woman being able to find a flat in London seemed one of the most glamorous things in the world--and this before I had the faintest idea of London prices.

William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms joins the ranks of those crime novels that use both London and the Thames to great effect. Here's the opening:

Let us start with the river--all things begin with the river, and we shall probably end there, no doubt--but let's wait and see how we go. Soon, in a minute or two, a young man will come and stand by the river's edge, here at Chelsea Bridge, in London.

And of course that was enough to hook me right in. I will not give away whether things do or do not end at the river, but the river is very much a part of the landscape through much of the book. It reveals itself in different aspects to different people, reflecting their inner lives as well as outer weather.

A chance encounter leads our hero, Adam Kindred, to become deeply implicated in a crime. His own decisions in response to this lead him further afield, until he finds himself looking at London from the lower strata, a view of the city that few tourists get to see. Meanwhile, there are some pretty major corporate shenanigans going on, and of course someone who's been sent to clean up untidy loose ends like, say, witnesses. Although at times this seems fairly standard stuff, the pacing keeps it lively.

What I find more interesting, and what I think most readers will, is not just the way Adam hides out in a vast and in many ways impersonal city, but the way in which he comes to accept that riding the river of chance, and being able to let go of the old life as necessary, is really all we have. There's a clever, ironic twist when another character has to make the same decision, but I'll leave that to you to find.

As it turns out, there are more than a few people in this book hiding from what they once were. But, as is pointed out in the novel, 600 people are reported missing in Britain every week. That a few of their fictional counterparts find their way between these pages does not in the end seem too improbable.