Book review: Shiver by Allie Reynolds

(image courtesy Hachette Australia)

For a species that craves certainty, humanity sure has an enduring fascination with the enduring endlessness of mystery and suspense.

Perhaps now that we are mostly, pandemics and their wrathful disruption aside, snug and safe within the clearly-set bounds of civilisation – sure it’s an illusion of substance and assuredness but it’s better than what we had previously for the most part – we are happily open to being thrilled and excited by the idea that somewhere the things we know (or think we know) sets a whole world of darkness waiting to be illuminated.

One author with a very powerful torch indeed is Allie Reynolds, a ex-snowboarder who has crafted in the fast-paced humanity of Shiver, a rip-roaringly engaging tale that speaks to that part of us which knows just how close to unknowingness our carefully-crafted realities are.

A step away from the bright lights of London and the UK where each of the characters in this bleakly atmospheric mystery thriller call home sits a host of thing unknown, all shadowed in darkness and all capable of striking back when no one suspects.

On the face of it, and after the events of ten years previously all of the invitees should likely have been a little more suspect of what might lie in wait at the ski resort of Le Rocher, France, an invitation to spend the weekend with old friends (though frenemies might work as a relational descriptor) brings together old snowboarding competition compatriots, none of whom really parted on the best of terms.

“It’s that time of the year again. The time the glacier gives up bodies.

The immense mass of ice up there is a frozen river that flows too easily for the eye to see. Recent victims brush their shoulders with older ones in its glassy depths. Some emerge at the top, others at the snout, and there’s no way of knowing who will come out next.

It can take years for them to reappear. Decades even. A glacier in neighbouring Italy made the news recently when it produced the mummified corpses of First World War soldiers, complete with helmets and rifles.

Still, what goes in must eventually come out, so I’ve been checking the local news every morning.

There’s one particular body that I’m waiting for.” (Prologue, page 1)

It’s a very Agatha Christie-esque set-up which involves mysterious emails asking Curtis, Milla (who is the witness and narrative voice of Shiver), married couple Dale and Heather, and Brent to come together after a traumatic parting of the ways a decade earlier.

Given the past events and dysfunctional relationships that are revealed during the course of a chillingly psychologically wrenching weekend, you have to wonder why any of them say “yes”, but then these are not your typical people, all of them driven to a large degree by the need to address things rather than flee from them.

It is the nature of the competitive beast and while more timid angels might retreat and leave well enough alone, these five people are not the kind to sit back and let sleeping dogs lie at the bottom of a deadly crevasse.

Milla, who is ambitious to a degree that alienates friends, family and possible lovers, and who has had to work for every bit of success she has in her fleeting grasp as a world-quality snowboarder, is representative of people who would all do what it takes to see their sporting hopes and dreams realised.

Save for then-barmaid, now-lawyer Heather who met her husband when he was at Le Rocher competing, Milla, Curtis, Brent and Dale are all people who do whatever it takes to get ahead; it’s natural in a competitive environment but as Reynolds beautifully and unnervingly demonstrates, it can have unintended deadly consequences.

Allie Reynolds (image courtesy Hachette Australia)

Which is, of course, perfect for a mystery thriller which alternates between events of a decade before and a weekend which gets deadlier and more frightening by the second.

As with any tautly-constructed thriller, there is a slew of mounting reveals and dark twists and turns that ratchet up the tension level and which leave the small group wondering if people they once considered friends are now anything but?

Milla is there because she hopes something might happen with Curtis whom she was attracted to way back when but who never became more than a friend and unofficial coach, and it is these strands of humanity that provide Shiver with a fiercely, emotionally resonant core that makes you read on and on with increasing eagerness because you want to know not just what happened to these flawed human beings but what is likely to happen to them.

Reynolds masterfully increases the tension and fearfulness of people who are, virtually from the get-go, used to getting the better of things that might better or defeat them but as many mystery writers down through the years have shown, all of the skill and capability and bravado in the world matter not when you are faced with events beyond your control.

Part of the reason these five are in the place they are ten years later is because their own hubris didn’t allow to see how fast they were walking to a disastrous ending to their decade-earlier relationships, borne of competition, love, the need for acceptance and success and a driving need to bolster their sense of self through epically impressive achievement.

“Brent and Heather are sitting close together in the restaurant when I [Milla] carry the cups out. They fall silent as I approach – which tells me exactly what they were talking about. I pull up a chair. Brent rakes his fingers through his hair; Heather drums her perfect nails on the table … She’s my polar opposite. I hope she has the sense not to tell Dale, or Brent will be in real trouble.” (P. 178)

Reynolds has written her characters so well and captured how people with so much strength and endurance can be reduced to nothing by events they don’t see coming because some basic tenets of decent, reciprocally beneficial human behaviour are simply not in their lexicon, that Shiver is moved along as much by who these people are as it is by what they did and what they, in a frighteningly challenging weekend, are now doing.

Thus, while you get the expected end of chapter reveals and grand announcements of long-held secrets (some are fearfully or tearfully whispered but then that makes sense given the trauma underlying them), you also get a revelatory window into the darker climes of the human condition and how people who want so many good and great things often end up with the quite the opposite despite their best efforts.

For all that though, Reynolds adroitly presents Milla et al. as fallible, broken people, not monsters, with even the great reveal in the final act soaked not in melodrama but sad, painful humanity, marking Shiver as a substantial cut above the usual mystery pack.

Shiver is an utterly engrossing novel, one that presents with compelling, well-realised characters, a simmeringly brutal mystery of many years brewing, events past and present that threaten far more than they promise (as is the way of a good mystery) and malevolent shadows just out of reach that grip you just as tight as the people they are tormenting and which drive you ever onwards to a reckoning which will leave everyone changed and all too aware that life always comes with consequences and some of them are deadly indeed.

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