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A review by museoffire
Deadly Dance by Hilary Bonner
2.0
I'm going to have to put the majority of this review under a spoiler tag because, in theory, in talking about my major issue with this book I've got to spoil "the big reveal." My issue is that the big reveal is neither big nor a reveal given that I worked it out based entirely on the blurb on the jacket. This doesn't make me Sherlock Holmes I assure you.
Here's the deal. Detective Inspector David Vogel and his team are called to the scene of a tragic murder. A fourteen year old girl has been found strangled in the street. She'd lied to her parents about a study date with a girlfriend and was clearly dressed up to meet someone, the question is who?
Author Hilary Bonner does a pretty good job with her crime solving team. Vogel is an interesting guy, solid, happy marriage which makes a nice change from the usual tortured investigative genius who sacrifices everything including those he loves for the sake of solving the crime, he's got a daughter very close in age to the victim and a good relationship with his team. He's a good person and good at his job and he's doing it for the right reasons and as far as setting him up as a long term protagonist of a series Bonner does a solid job. I like the guy.
Unfortunately that's about all I can say for this book. The lead detective seems like a nice person. Because at the same time as we are meeting Vogel and his crack team who honestly all kind of blended together for me since he's the only one who gets developed Bonner is beating a really, really dead horse of a murder mystery trope when it comes to the actual crime being investigated.
So here's what the book jacket has to say about who the murderer might be.
Detective Inspector David Vogel is led towards three very different principal protagonists, each of whom grows increasingly chilling. But are they what they seem? And is any one of them capable of murder?
We meet the first of these "very different" characters on page nine. His name is Saul. He's followed shortly by Leo and then Al. None of these men has a last name, a family, friends, or any kind of defining characteristic physical or personality wise beyond being shady as hell guys who are all looking for their own versions of "love/sex" and lying about their identities to their prospective partners/victims. They also all sound EXACTLY the same. They also aren't "introduced" to Vogel. They exist in a narrative vacuum of individual subplots that are all occurring around the primary murder investigation before awkwardly converging at the end. It takes Vogel the ENTIRE book to work out that they are, as I figured from page nine, the same person because of everyone's favorite murder mystery chestnut....say it with me now....Dissociative Identity Disorder.
This isn't the worst murder mystery/thriller plot device in the world, not if its handled right. Hell, M. Knight Shyamalan and James McAvoy knocked it out of the damn park in this years "Split," [b:Fight Club|5759|Fight Club|Chuck Palahniuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1357128997s/5759.jpg|68729] certainly makes it work, and lest we forget [b:Psycho|156427|Psycho|Robert Bloch|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1393286878s/156427.jpg|3279468]? So its possible to not just make it work but to make it absolutely outstanding.
Unfortunately Bonner's DID character is neither outstanding nor accurately portrayed. I don't know a ton about DID but I do know that people who suffer from it didn't catch it like a cold or inherit it genetically as Bonner's character appears to have. My understanding is that its basically a defense mechanism that kicks in as a result of extreme childhood trauma usually of a sexual nature. The child's personality, unable to cope with what is happening, basically splinters off into another or other personalities that compartmentalize whats happening in a way that allows the child to mentally survive.
It doesn't always manifest right away but when it does these people are not totally stable members of society tricking everyone with a carefully executed bait and switch as their personalities seamlessly check in and out. They're a barely contained mess, they black out, are severely depressed, they often self harm and most of them have attempted suicide at least once and they almost all experience various symptoms of severe PTSD from whatever trauma they've experienced.
In other words you'd know something was wrong with someone dealing with this. You might not know it was DID but they'd be projecting some pretty serious symptoms of mental instability.
I learned all that from reading a couple of memoirs of people with DID and just now a very quick glance at "Psychology Today" and Wikipedia. Things Bonner clearly did not do.
Instead she gives us a character who appears to have been born with DID and is also a fully formed psychopath and self loathing homosexual who not only successfully fooled everyone in his life all the way up to adulthood but also managed to pass all the law enforcement psychological testing with flying colors because he's a member of Vogel's investigation squad!
We also spend no time with this guy when he's not being one of his other "personalities." There's a throw away mention of a possible murder in his past that's only mentioned on like the second to last page but the trauma in his life appears to be "being gay" because all his personalities deal with is his sexual issues. One of them (the one that killed the girl) is a pedophile (but not really because...gay!), one is a self loathing gay guy, and one is a guy who wants a "family" with a woman and tries internet dating and mail order brides (but can't get it up because...gay!).
So in addition to being dead boring Bonner's take on DID is also weirdly awful and homophobic since she seems to be implying that being gay is either a disorder or so traumatic and awful that you can get DID from repressing it or just being one? Its also not at all accurate since people with DID DO experience distinct sexual orientations just as if they WERE different people. They also have unique histories and personality traits. Bonner's murderer is literally the exact same guy in every way except they deal with being gay differently.
I kind of feel like if we'd just spent some time with the murderer when he wasn't being someone else and learned just a bit about what HIS life was like, where he came from, who he was when he wasn't in these altered states it would have gone a long way toward ramping up the tension. As it is he's the typical "wait who's that guy again?" murderer who I kind of remembered but not really who gets a "this is what he was REALLY like" reveal at the end when his ex wife conveniently shows up to validate the DID diagnosis. Instead everyone keeps remarking on how they "never really knew him" because he was very close mouthed about his home life etc. Like that's how he kept all of this hidden, by just not talking about his life outside the office. Rigghhht.
So sloppy as hell research and a seriously dead boring story combine to overpower relatively okay writing for a perfect storm of "eh."
Here's the deal. Detective Inspector David Vogel and his team are called to the scene of a tragic murder. A fourteen year old girl has been found strangled in the street. She'd lied to her parents about a study date with a girlfriend and was clearly dressed up to meet someone, the question is who?
Author Hilary Bonner does a pretty good job with her crime solving team. Vogel is an interesting guy, solid, happy marriage which makes a nice change from the usual tortured investigative genius who sacrifices everything including those he loves for the sake of solving the crime, he's got a daughter very close in age to the victim and a good relationship with his team. He's a good person and good at his job and he's doing it for the right reasons and as far as setting him up as a long term protagonist of a series Bonner does a solid job. I like the guy.
Unfortunately that's about all I can say for this book. The lead detective seems like a nice person. Because at the same time as we are meeting Vogel and his crack team who honestly all kind of blended together for me since he's the only one who gets developed Bonner is beating a really, really dead horse of a murder mystery trope when it comes to the actual crime being investigated.
So here's what the book jacket has to say about who the murderer might be.
We meet the first of these "very different" characters on page nine. His name is Saul. He's followed shortly by Leo and then Al. None of these men has a last name, a family, friends, or any kind of defining characteristic physical or personality wise beyond being shady as hell guys who are all looking for their own versions of "love/sex" and lying about their identities to their prospective partners/victims. They also all sound EXACTLY the same. They also aren't "introduced" to Vogel. They exist in a narrative vacuum of individual subplots that are all occurring around the primary murder investigation before awkwardly converging at the end. It takes Vogel the ENTIRE book to work out that they are, as I figured from page nine, the same person because of everyone's favorite murder mystery chestnut....say it with me now....Dissociative Identity Disorder.
This isn't the worst murder mystery/thriller plot device in the world, not if its handled right. Hell, M. Knight Shyamalan and James McAvoy knocked it out of the damn park in this years "Split," [b:Fight Club|5759|Fight Club|Chuck Palahniuk|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1357128997s/5759.jpg|68729] certainly makes it work, and lest we forget [b:Psycho|156427|Psycho|Robert Bloch|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1393286878s/156427.jpg|3279468]? So its possible to not just make it work but to make it absolutely outstanding.
Unfortunately Bonner's DID character is neither outstanding nor accurately portrayed. I don't know a ton about DID but I do know that people who suffer from it didn't catch it like a cold or inherit it genetically as Bonner's character appears to have. My understanding is that its basically a defense mechanism that kicks in as a result of extreme childhood trauma usually of a sexual nature. The child's personality, unable to cope with what is happening, basically splinters off into another or other personalities that compartmentalize whats happening in a way that allows the child to mentally survive.
It doesn't always manifest right away but when it does these people are not totally stable members of society tricking everyone with a carefully executed bait and switch as their personalities seamlessly check in and out. They're a barely contained mess, they black out, are severely depressed, they often self harm and most of them have attempted suicide at least once and they almost all experience various symptoms of severe PTSD from whatever trauma they've experienced.
In other words you'd know something was wrong with someone dealing with this. You might not know it was DID but they'd be projecting some pretty serious symptoms of mental instability.
I learned all that from reading a couple of memoirs of people with DID and just now a very quick glance at "Psychology Today" and Wikipedia. Things Bonner clearly did not do.
Instead she gives us a character who appears to have been born with DID and is also a fully formed psychopath and self loathing homosexual who not only successfully fooled everyone in his life all the way up to adulthood but also managed to pass all the law enforcement psychological testing with flying colors because he's a member of Vogel's investigation squad!
We also spend no time with this guy when he's not being one of his other "personalities." There's a throw away mention of a possible murder in his past that's only mentioned on like the second to last page but the trauma in his life appears to be "being gay" because all his personalities deal with is his sexual issues. One of them (the one that killed the girl) is a pedophile (but not really because...gay!), one is a self loathing gay guy, and one is a guy who wants a "family" with a woman and tries internet dating and mail order brides (but can't get it up because...gay!).
So in addition to being dead boring Bonner's take on DID is also weirdly awful and homophobic since she seems to be implying that being gay is either a disorder or so traumatic and awful that you can get DID from repressing it or just being one? Its also not at all accurate since people with DID DO experience distinct sexual orientations just as if they WERE different people. They also have unique histories and personality traits. Bonner's murderer is literally the exact same guy in every way except they deal with being gay differently.
I kind of feel like if we'd just spent some time with the murderer when he wasn't being someone else and learned just a bit about what HIS life was like, where he came from, who he was when he wasn't in these altered states it would have gone a long way toward ramping up the tension. As it is he's the typical "wait who's that guy again?" murderer who I kind of remembered but not really who gets a "this is what he was REALLY like" reveal at the end when his ex wife conveniently shows up to validate the DID diagnosis. Instead everyone keeps remarking on how they "never really knew him" because he was very close mouthed about his home life etc. Like that's how he kept all of this hidden, by just not talking about his life outside the office. Rigghhht.
So sloppy as hell research and a seriously dead boring story combine to overpower relatively okay writing for a perfect storm of "eh."