Boy in the Water (Stephen Dobyns, 1999)

Although Homicide read like a thriller and gripped me from the start, it wasn't fiction and I wanted to read some if only to cut down on the numbers of unread books on my shelves and so I picked up Boy in the Water. It's a cliche to call a book 'unputdownable' but I did really get absorbed by this one, only putting it down so that I could pick up Homicide and read a little more of that. It's an unusual thriller in that nothing much seems to happen for a great deal of the book, or rather there are no murders to solve, no standard whodunnit.

The book opens with a prologue in which the title is expanded upon only briefly - a young boy is found floating dead in a school swimming pool - and then chapter 1 takes the reader back a couple of months and describes the events that led up to this point, and eventually, perhaps 2/3 of the way in, past this point. So it's not just a 'whodunnit', it's also a 'who-is-it-floating-in-the-water' and a 'how-did-it-happen'. I'm not describing this well, but it's not the standard template for a crime thriller. 

The tale takes place at Bishop's Hill school, where naughty kids are sent when their fee-paying parents cannot send them anywhere else. Jim Hawthorne is the new principal with baggage of his own (his wife and daughter died in a fire) and a determination to stop the school failing and closing. He is thwarted at every turn by a school staff packed full of suspicious characters, who spin any event or utterance from Jim into a doom-mongering negative. They gossip amongst themselves about job losses and closure while Jim tries to reassure them he's not out to let people go. Dobyns creates a very realistic atmosphere of distrust and destructive rumour and Jim's frustration translates to the reader - I know I just wanted to reach into the book and throttle some of the pessimistic teachers! 

Other new arrivals at the school, along with Jim, include 15 year old Jessica, who was abused by her stepfather and plots revenge; and Frank LeBrun, who kills a man with an ice pick when we first meet him, and then runs off to Bishop's Hill to be an assistant cook. He's a dodgy one all the way through, but then there are members of the staff, like cheery Skander, who previously held a caretaker principal position and turns out to have been embezzling funds, who turn out to be potentially worse in a moral sense than killer Frank. 

Jim experiences hoax phone calls from a woman purporting to be his dead wife, sees the portrait of the school's founder at random windows and has to deal with the school psychologist's suicide at the same time as keeping the school afloat against a tide of indifference and outright hostility. This is such an enthralling book, with many mysteries jostling along together, with a cast of tens of teachers and students so it really takes a long time before I could positively identify who I thought might be the titular Boy in the Water and who might have put him there. If I wasn't trying to cut down my library of books I'd seek out more of Dobyns' fiction on the basis of this fantastic piece of fiction. I'd recommend it to any lover of books.