The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross is an excellent book in the police-procedural, murder-mystery genre with a great hook: it’s set on a small (fictional) island adjacent to Trinidad and Barbados called Camaho.
The author was born and raised in Grenada (which is an actual island adjacent to Trinidad and Barbados), and so was I! Ross uses his familiarity and comfort with the culture, geography, and language of the West Indies to infuse this story with the verisimilitude of Island life. You can almost taste the mangoes, smell the spicy curry and feel the bumps when driving on the badly paved roads!
The main character in The Bone Readers is Michael “Digger” Digson. In the great tradition of the crime fiction protagonists, Digger has a troubled past and a complex personality. Early on in the book we discover that he’s an “outside child” (illegitimate son) of an important man on the island, the Commissioner of Police. This is a curious coincidence because it is only through some unusual circumstances that Digger became a police officer himself. Basically, he was bullied into doing it by DC Chilman, an apparently alcoholic detective very near retirement with an eye for rudderless youths with the potential and talent to become excellent police officers. Digger lives by himself, in the house left to him by his grandmother, who has raised him since the awful day a little over a decade ago when Digger was a little boy that his mom kissed him and said “Don’t worry, Sweetman, I home a lil later” and never came home again. In fact, her body was never even found but it’s pretty clear she was killed as part of a public protest in 1999 that was violently settled by the police at the time. Part of the reason why Digger agreed to become a cop was so that he could research his mother’s death and disappearance and discover the details of the role his father may have played in her death.
If you think Digger has a complex personality, Ross is just getting started. Many of the other players in the novel, such as DC Chilman, Miss Stanislaus and Malan Greaves are also fascinating characters. They all have complicated relationships with each other and oftentimes with Digger. As I have said in reviewing other books, a key factor in the assessment of the quality of a genre book is the multifaceted nature of how the secondary characters are depicted. Since most police procedurals are very similar what makes the reader continue to enjoy them and read volume after volume in a long-running genre series are the changes and developments that happen to characters that readers can identify with and/or care about. From this perspective, The Bone Readers is very high-quality first entry in what I hope becomes an extended series of books.
DC Chilman, we discover, has an outside child himself and a surprisingly durable relationship with the Minister of Justice (the most important law enforcement official in the island country.) Malan Greaves is Digger’s boss; he takes over supervision of the Camaho police station after Chilman retires. Malan has his own foibles. He’s married but he’s constantly flirting (and more) with women and is all too eager to engage in violence himself to “keep the peace.” This behavior is forced to change with the arrival of Miss Stanislaus on the force, who wants nothing to do with Malan but notes everything he does. Miss Stanislaus is brilliant, with Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction. But she also has a troubled past, and although her professional and personal disdain for Malan is quite clear, her attitude towards Digger is quite different. They make an intriguing couple, and an effective team.
The pace of the story is somewhat languorous, like the pace of island life, but this doesn’t make The Bone Readers any less compelling. The central mysteries are all “cold cases’ of varying degree. There’s the case of who killed Digger’s mom, which he is obsessed with, for obvious reasons. There’s also the case of a missing young man named Nathan that Chilman is obsessed with and makes Digger (and Malan) promise to focus on after their mentor retires. In their investigation of Nathan’s disappearance, Miss Stanislaus and Digger find out about someone else who has disappeared, a teenaged girl named Alice, and Miss Stanislaus notices that something is very peculiar about the church that Nathan and Alice attended. The Old Hope Spiritual Baptist Church is run by a charismatic (and corpulent) preacher named Deacon Bello who happens to be a spiritual advisor to several very important men on the island, including, it turns out, the Minister of Justice. Miss Stanislaus joins the church and starts living at their compound with several other women and young children, any of whom appear to be curiously similar. However things get hectic when Deacon Bello ends up dead at the hands of Miss Stanislaus using an official police weapon she had never been officially issued.
Overall, reading The Bone Readers, especially for someone who was born (and partially raised) in the Caribbean, is a rare treat and joyful experience. The book shimmies and shimmers with the sounds and sights of the islands. The dialogue has the rhythms and cadences of island patois, and the descriptions reflect the unique look and feel of "home." There are so many familiar (and unfamiliar) little details that produce feelings of nostalgia and pride (“Yes! This is how we/they do!”) which is a very unusual experience for me to have while reading crime fiction, but a welcome one. I think even for people without a familial connection to the islands, the novelty of the setting and the richness of the story will be attractive and compelling. I hope to spend A LOT more time with Miss Stanislaus and DC Digger solving mysteries on Camaho, so I hope Mr. Ross writes more books, and soon!
Title: The Bone Readers.
Author: Jacob Ross.
Kindle: 273 pages.
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press.
Date Published: November 8, 2016.
Date Read: February 3, 2021
OVERALL GRADE: A/A+ (4.17/4.0).
PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A+.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.
