Items related to The Water Clock
A small-town journalist thinks he’s found his big break when a frozen corpse is found in the trunk of a car, but when another body is found and the crimes are linked to a murder from thirty years ago, he starts to see just how big—and dangerous—this case will be.
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Review:
"A great story--at last," remarks newspaper journalist Philip Dryden, as he considers the mutilated body of a man found in the trunk of a car pulled from the frozen River Lark in England's watery Cambridgeshire Fens district. After spending most of his career reporting on national politics and other contemptible doings in hectic London, Dryden--the protagonist in Jim Kelly's debut novel, The Water Clock--deserves a break from his more mundane rural assignments, writing about flower shows and golden wedding anniversaries. However, he doesn't know just how consuming this "great story" will be--or that it will soon connect to the finding of a second, older corpse, this one wrapped around an ancient cathedral gargoyle, and lead back to an unsolved, 1966 filling-station robbery, during which a woman was shot and blinded.
About the Author:
Kelly, an education correspondent for Britain's Financial Times, deftly captures the quirky staffing and droll provinciality endemic to country weeklies, such as Dryden's The Crow. ("[T]he day after press day was plagued by serial whingers who'd spotted tiny mistakes, and occasional whoppers. Dryden’s favourite ... had been the week they’d included the death notice of Albert Morris in the 'Used Cars' column.") It's Dryden himself, though, who is best rendered in these pages. An irrationally exuberant ink-slinger and "dedicated physical coward of extraordinary range," he’s encumbered by guilt for having left his wife, Laura, in a coma after a foggy-night accident sent their car into a river. Some unknown person dragged Dryden to safety, but abandoned Laura. The reporter now refuses to drive, instead being squired about by a taciturn cabbie, and makes regular, if increasingly hopeless visits to his wife's bedside. But when a cop on the outs with his bosses asks Dryden to falsify a story in order to expose a murderer, the newsie sees an opportunity to bargain for information about what really happened the night of that car crash--giving little thought to how the killer might strike back at him, or the defenseless Laura.
The Water Clock's plot is confusing on occasion, and the climactic drama here is undercut by too much mystery-solving dialogue. Still, this first installment of a new series is confidently composed and makes excellent use of its singular setting. Dryden seems destined to find many more great stories in the future. --J. Kingston Pierce
Jim Kelly is a journalist and educational correspondent with The Financial Times in London. In addition to the five releases in his Philip Dryden series, he is also the creator of DI Shaw and DS Valentin series.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDorchester Pub Co Inc
- ISBN 10 1428510982
- ISBN 13 9781428510982
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages120
- Rating
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