// eBook
Sparkle
Written by Rudy Yuly –
In a luxurious house in the hills above Seattle, Assistant DA Silver,
his wife and their six-year-old daughter Lucy are found brutally beaten
to death. Detective George Louis and his partner Pinky Bjorgesen are
assigned the case. Once the forensic team have done what they have to
do, the house is turned over to the professional cleaners. Sparkle is a
team of two brothers, Joe and Eddie Jones, who specialise in cleaning up
the aftermath of violent death scenes. Joe is a misanthropic,
chain-smoking baseball addict who runs the business, but it is Eddie who
actually does the cleaning work. Eddie is deeply autistic and locked
into his own strange world by childhood trauma. Joe is also a prisoner,
but of a different kind. While he profits from Eddie’s uncanny ability
to convert an abattoir of a murder scene back into a normal house, he is
literally his brother’s keeper. No-one else can manage the repetitive
rituals and piano-wire tensions of Eddie’s life.
While the hunt goes on for the killer of the Silver family, the
brothers are called in again to clean up a seemingly unrelated multiple
shooting in an illegal Chinese gambling house. In the Silver house,
while Eddie went through his exhaustive and surreal cleaning ritual he
was led to something tangible which may hold a clue to the killer’s
identity. Once again, in the bloody aftermath of the Chinese shooting,
he is shown something that the police have missed.
Rudy Yuly is a screenwriter and there is a clear sense of the visual
in his clear and direct writing. We know within a sentence or two
exactly what people look like and how they move and talk. Eddie sees
things with almost microscopic clarity. His vision gives us a vivid
picture, in particular of Jolie Walker, the beautiful zoo attendant who
takes him for a weekly walk around the pens and enclosures. This book
does not do comfort, and I physically wriggled with embarrassment at the
poignant exchanges between tongue-tied Joe and his wary girlfriend
LaVonne.
The author does a brilliant job of letting us see, hear and smell
Eddie’s world through his own senses. Sparkle is disturbing and edgy,
and there is a great deal of compassion extended to those who have to
deal with Eddie’s shortcomings and strange gifts. We are taken on a
high-risk course. It is one thing to introduce a supernatural element
into a story through the perceptions of one person as this can be
explained away by mood, confusion or the power of suggestion. It is
another thing altogether to have a piece of physical evidence pass from
the spirit world, via the live intermediary, into the hands of those who
are conducting a murder investigation.
This is such a difficult book to categorise. Yes, there is
criminality and yes, there is detection. But the bedrock here is a
description of misunderstanding, loss, and inadequacy. Perfectly decent
people blunder about trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Bit
by bit what really damaged the lives of these brothers is revealed. The
original killer is finally unmasked, but the story is less about that
than it is about the terrifying and bewildering world of autism. My only
caveat about the story is the supernatural element. Readers who find it
troublesome will find the book less satisfying than someone who simple
accepts it and lets themselves be carried along with the narrative.
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