There is an intriguing opening to Gary L. Kreigh’s thriller SILENCE THE PAST. William Davisly is waiting for a truck to come to collect and return a recently purchased antique bureau. In a hidden compartment in the desk he has discovered a letter which reveals a secret from his past. With the desk collected, Davisly retrieves a snub-nosed Colt .38 from the night stand. The scene shifts to the removal men in their van on the driveway discussing how odd Davisly’s behavior had been. A shot is heard from within the house. Davisly is dead. A presumed suicide. But what drove him to it and was it really a suicide at all?
SILENCE THE PAST is a literary thriller centered around a local charity and its connected high end antique gallery where clients, known as proprietors, consign various items. Forensic accountant and lecturer Callan Morrow is drawn into investigating potential fraud and embezzlement at the charity, alerted by one of the students on the Intro To Fraud class he teaches at the local college. Davisly was on the board at the charity and a rumor suggests he was somehow connected to a series of decades old unsolved murders. With Morrow on the case and the owner of the gallery attempting to discover how and why she has been targeted by persons unknown, a story of blackmail and hidden family history is slowly revealed. Though the use of antique armoires as a practical method of delivering blackmail notes may seem a stretch, SILENCE THE PAST uses it as a device which cleverly connects the physical remnants of history with the abstraction of carefully edited past lives.
Kreigh is very good at conjuring a world of small town gossip and his characters are well drawn and entirely convincing in the way that they talk and interact. Sometimes the dialogue sequences are rather too long and, though undoubtedly realistic, the character’s meandering conversations take a while to get to the point and move the story forward. Contrasting this with the lean and dramatic opening told almost entirely through Davisly’s interior monologue and it’s a disappointment that a lot of the drama and detection is dulled by this unnecessarily extended chit-chat. That said, when the novel eventually kicks into gear there are plenty of surprises, particularly in the uncovering of a family’s links to the Ku Klux Klan.
Gary L. Kreigh’s SILENCE THE PAST is an enjoyable literary thriller that blends fraud, murder and hidden family histories that manages to capture a convincing world of small town intrigue where darkness is never too far from the surface.
Kent Lane for IndieReader