Book Review: BROKEN GRACE by E.C. Diskin
Thomas & Mercer/Amazon Publishing
Publication Date: August 25, 2015
E.C. Diskin may do for the
Lower Peninsula of Michigan what Daniel Woodrell did for the Missouri
Ozarks. She is that good and that
talented. Broken Grace is like a
mashup of Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone the critically
acclaimed Vince Gilligan crime drama Breaking Bad. This thriller has murder, drugs, amnesia,
family secrets, infidelity, stupid criminals, menacing villains, gambling,
junked cars, good, bad and a lot of gray.
The novel opens with Grace
Abbott, age twenty, fleeing her home in rural Michigan on a cold Saturday
morning, December 7, 2013. She’s jumped
into her car, and needs to get to the police.
As she drives to the station, a deer bolts across the road. Grace slams on the breaks, but hits the deer. Her car swerves off highway, and Grace slams
her head hard before the car runs into a tree.
She awakens eight days later in a hospital in Kalamazoo. Grace cannot remember anything due to a
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The doctor believes Grace’s memory will return if
she rests and takes the heavy psychotropic medications he’s prescribed. Her older sister Lisa has been sitting vigil at
Grace’s bed, and Grace goes with Lisa to their family home just outside Sawyer,
Michigan so that she can rest and recover.
Grace is scarcely home for an
hour before Detectives Bishop and Officer Hackett show up. They have come to question Grace about
Michael Cahill, whom Lisa says was Grace’s boyfriend until about week ago. Grace inquires if Michael is in trouble. You could say that—Michael Cahill is
dead. He was shot in bed in the
apartment which he and Grace had shared. The police want Grace’s help figuring
out what Michael was doing up until he died, but Grace is not able to recall
anything. Lisa is very protective and stops the interview from going further.
Bishop is the senior
investigator, and spent most of his career in Detroit. Justin Hackett is a
local rookie, newly transferred from Indiana. Like many seasoned homicide detectives, Bishop
believes the killer is probably the person closest to the victim, and that
would be Grace. Justin has his own reasons for wanting the killer to be anyone
but Grace.
Grace is in the most
vulnerable position in every possible way.
She is physically weak, suffering from terrible headaches and
insomnia. She initially only gets
flashes of memory of her life before the crash, and many of these are
traumatizing. Grace becomes the center
of the novel, but only truly comes into focus once she becomes her own
detective. She cannot trust anyone, and so she must rely on herself to discover who she is, and who murdered
Michael. Grace may seem rather weak at
the start, but she is not to be underestimated.
As Bishop and Hackett work
the case, they uncover unseemly details about Michael Cahill’s life. There were many people who wanted Michael
dead, and for various reasons. He was a
drug user who gambled, he cheated on Grace, and he hung out with men and women
of ill repute. These details coalesce and
bring an urgency to find out if Grace was the murderer—or if she is the next
intended victim.
On its police procedural merits alone, the novel is excellent. The device of
revealing the plot through Grace’s emerging memories, as well as through Bishop
and Hackett’s investigation, is genius. E.C.
Diskin has a sensitive grasp of human behavior, and great
noir chops. Broken Grace is an
exceptional thriller with hairpin plot turns and moral complexity.
Thank you to Thomas &
Mercer for loaning me a digital copy of the book through NetGalley.
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