The Colour of Bee Larkham’s Murder
by Sarah Harris
I haven’t done a crime review for a while, but I took this one on holiday with me, and even though I know it’s probably going to be all over the place in the next few months, I still want to say a few things about it.
As a crime fan I like everything from gruesome hunt-the-serial-killer through to period detective stories where you’re not even sure if there’s been a murder for the first half of the book. One of the developments over the last few years that I’m particularly pleased by is the number of really unusual crime novels that are getting promoted by the big publishers. And unusual is definitely the way to describe this book. The story is told from the perspective of Jasper, a young boy with synaesthesia, a condition that causes his brain to mix and substitute sensory information. Jasper ‘hears’ in colours and textures, and while he is able to be very precise in telling people what he is experiencing his meaning is often lost in translation or ignored. When his neighbour Bee Larkham goes missing there are things Jasper knows that he wants to tell the police, but they don’t understand and can’t see that boy who can’t recognise faces and hears colours might be able to lead them to what really happened to Bee. Jasper has a new colour, the colour of murder and since the police don’t think he can help he’ll have to figure out the truth for himself. Unbeknownst to Jasper there is someone who thinks he might be able to do just that, someone who already knows what happened because they were there and wants to stop Jasper by any means necessary.
This is as much a story about synaesthesia as it is a crime novel, but without short-changing the story. It reminds me a little of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, though more for the main character than anything else. It’s a charming and fairly easy read with plenty of tension and suspense, but nothing gruesome and Jasper is a fascinating protagonist. I can see this book being enjoyed by a wide variety of readers, I certainly did.