“Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.” Eleanor Roosevelt

I always like to set the tone for the review with a quote. I could have picked Don’t Stand So Close To Me by The Police for this one: “Young teacher the subject of school girl fantasy, she wants him so badly, knows what she wants to be…” But I feel this book goes beyond the teacher-pupil story. At its heart is justice.

Nick Dean’s world caves in around him as a student levels an accusation against him that he touched her inappropriately. It isn’t true but the general principle of being innocent until proven guilty is turned on its head in these circumstances. He is immediately suspended from teaching, and worse, not permitted to be unsupervised with his children, which causes enormous strain on his family life as his wife juggles her job and the childcare. Nick simply cannot understand why he has been accused by this girl, Angela.

Angela isn’t one of the popular girls in school. Prone to being a loner, she’s unhappy at home, regularly having stand up rows with her mum. Her parents are divorced, a common enough reason for a child to be upset, angry and bewildered. But can this really be the root of why Angela creates such a fantasy about her teacher, the only teacher who actually seemed to encourage her in her classes?

I always struggle with stories where there is an undercurrent of false accusation or injustice. It must be my inner lawyer railing against it. This novel deftly treads the line, scattering elements of doubt about what we think we know to be the truth but leaves you wondering whether justice will indeed be served, and to whom.

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Carl Jung

Joe Thorne receives an email. “I know what happened to your sister. It’s happening again.”  Up to his eyes in gambling debts, Joe returns to the mining town of his childhood, to take a newly vacant position as an English teacher in his former school and keep his head down. The town is in a depressing slump after the closure of the pits years ago. But something else is at work in the town. A boy and his mother have been found dead in an apparent murder suicide, but painted on the wall in blood above the boy’s bed are the words “Not my son”. After going missing for two days, Joe’s sister Annie was also not his sister, she was different, darker. As the book unravels and Joe tries to uncover what happened to the boy and his mother, the teacher whose class he now teaches and in whose cottage he now lives, we slowly learn of the strange events of what happened to Annie.

I started this book expecting a regular tale of a kidnapping but Tudor takes this deeper and I am more reminded of Stephen King’s works than that of a standard crime thriller. There’s something supernatural in the air, which Tudor takes her time to reveal. Jo Thorne is a troubled man, not easy to like but you do anyway. After the prologue, the book is narrated by Joe, who treats us to witty asides during conversations but is slow to enlighten us on what happened to his sister. Clearly he’s reluctant to drag up the past but he also wants to put a stop to the forces that are causing history to repeat itself, and takes action into his own hands.

The writing is in part accomplished and evocative, though in other parts a little rough and unpolished, which may just be the character of Joe, educated in literature but rooted in his working class history. After taking it’s time to get going, the book picks up to a dramatic and unexpected conclusion and will be a story that lingers, long after the last page is turned.