HANNAH KING She and I. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Hannah King’s debut novel is an unsettling murder mystery with a longstanding female friendship at its core.
She and I is a detective story with a difference. It is set in Ireland but there are few indications of this, apart from a police officer’s query about whether the murder was possibly sectarian. We know from the start who killed Peter Denny, but not why. DI Chris Rice, on the other hand, knows nothing at all apart from the fact that Keeley Mackley has reported a murder at her house and that Keeley and Jude Jameson had been there when it took place.
We first meet Chris Rice in the incident room at the police station. His head ‘feels as though it is full of cotton wool’, and he is annoyed that this ‘Peter Denny character’ got himself ‘murdered on a bank holiday’. Unfortunately for him, it turns out that there had been a party at the Keeley house that night and both girls had passed out due to alcohol and, possibly, drugs, so they know nothing about what had happened. They had, they claimed, found Pete’s body in the kitchen the next morning; everyone who had been at the party had left, so Keeley had phoned the police.
The reader, however, knows that this is not quite true:
‘We both slept in my bed,’ Keeley says, though she has said it six or seven times in the last half hour. ‘I woke up first and went downstairs and found him. I came and got you. You touched him to check on him but he was already gone. We called the police straight away. Yeah?’
We know, too, from Jude, that Keeley had actually woken on a downstairs sofa to find Jude distraught and blood-stained, with the knife at her feet. And Keeley had been scared of her.
Keeley and Jude have been almost inseparable friends since they were small children. As Jude’s mother, Linda, tells Chris Rice, Jude was completely obsessed with Keeley from the moment they met in a green space between their houses, and, to Linda’s disgust, Jude still spent every possible moment with Keeley. Linda disapproves of the Mackleys, whose way of life is the opposite of what she considers correct. Her plans for Jude and Jude’s disabled brother have always been clear: he would be ‘a perfect, healthy, clever boy’with his father’s brains and her own ethos; Jude ‘would be the academic’. She hates Keeley’s influence on Jude and does her best to keep them apart, but to no avail.
Jude is not quite 18, and, as her ‘appropriate adult’ during police interviews, Linda irritates Chris Rice and his offsider, Detective Sergeant Jessica Curran. Rice glances at Jess’s notebook during the first interview, in which Linda does most of the talking, and sees ‘overbearing’ underlined and Jess’s pen tapping on it.
Peter Denny, it transpires, was Keeley’s boyfriend. He was also, as Keeley deliberately tells the police, a drug dealer who, potentially, had many enemies. Mack, Keeley’s older brother and part-owner of their house since their parents’ deaths, has invented a new psychoactive drug, potentially hangover-free and called ‘sixes’, which was being taken at the party. However, no evidence of drugs had been found by police when they searched the house. Also there is evidence that Pete and Mack had fought viciously a few months earlier; and that Keeley and Pete had a violent argument on the night of the party. So, for Chris Rice, there seem to be a number of possible killers.
Each chapter of She and I is narrated by one of the main characters: Jude, Keeley, Linda, Mack and Chris Rice. Each has a distinctive voice and personality and, as the investigation progresses, we learn more about them and about the events leading up to the murder.
Chris Rice seems to be a typical novelist’s DI: middle-aged, separated from his wife, living on beers, pizza and Chinese takeaways, and struggling through work with a constant hangover. His methods of investigating are often unconventional and his frequent periods out of the office are beginning to threaten his career. The girls also remind him of his beloved daughter, Rebecca, whose puzzling absence is only explained late in the book:
Jude wears no make-up, so I can see the bags under her eyes. I notice, then, she wears only one tiny diamond stud earring. I try to remember Rebecca at seventeen; try to recall if this is normal, for a girl to have only one earring. All I can see is nine-year-old Rebecca at the rock pool, like the photograph on my desk, the only one Aisling gifted me during our separation.
Keeley is intelligent and fiercely protective of Jude, and Jude is not quite what she initially seems to be. Whether their friendship will survive the lies they have agreed to tell is just part of the story, but it becomes more pressing when first Keeley, then Mack, become chief suspects in the murder enquiry.
Hannah King has been described in the publishers’ advertising as the ‘new Irish voice’, and She and I is her first published novel. It is an unsettling and unusual story with well-developed characters, unexpected twists and a surprising ending. That the girls live opposite each other at ‘Wits End in Vetobridge’ is perhaps not the best choice of place-names but, overall, this is an excellent debut.
Hannah King She and I Bloomsbury 2022 PB 304pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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