Book Review~~H. A. Dawson Writes Lots of Books! Here Is One
Girl On A Train: She is a stranger, but they all know her past (Luke Adams Investigates Book 1)
Honor Amelia Dawson
is a British writer living in the Fenlands of Eastern England.
She spent 20 years in Intelligence Technology (IT) as a software developer and systems analyst for one of the U.K’s largest banking groups.
And, according to Honor, this professional background has provided the understanding, patience and diligence to write full length novels.
In addition to a career in IT, travel to all sorts of places, and the completion of a breathtaking number of books, Honor and her partner, Doug, farm their own land and live a mindful life of alternative approaches to diet and medicine.
I have decided to print, in its entirety, this description that Honor sent me yesterday:
“We both tend our smallholding and grow 6 types of squash, cruciferous vegetables which include cauliflower, cabbage, garden cress, bok choy, broccoli, brussel sprouts and similar green leaf vegetables.Mange tout, sugar snaps, peas, sweetcorn, broad beans fine beans,runner beans french beans Lots of salad leaf inc mizuna, rocket and lambs lettuce little gem,Chinese leaf Certain slug resistant potatoes. Fruit 5 types of apples, 3 types of cherries, summer and autumn raspberries, red black and white currants, 3 types of gooseberry,jostaberry, tayberry, winter blackberry, 3 types of pear, grapes, peach. apricot, 3 types of strawberry, plums victoria, czar greengage cambridge gage and damson, nuts hazelnut, almond and walnut and figs!
That’s most of the food as vegetarian, Doug pickles and preserves any surplus or shares it with our friends.
It seems impressive, some years certain plants produce low yealds, but we do quite well.
What we eat is best explained by Doug who is the cook and never measures anything for the recipes.
We grow culinary herbs some medicinal herbs, some grow naturally which is convenient.”
Doug is, I understand, something of a genius in the field of creative technology, soon to be heard from as he decides to put his talents out into the world. While we are waiting, however, Honor tells us that
“his professional activities include WordPress website design, and graphics including book cover design. He provides graphics in various formats including PNG, JPEG, and in PSD or similar i.e. layers.”
And now we return to Honor Amelia Dawson, prolific author of mystery novels:
Her catalogue is approaching 21 books
As Girl on a Train begins, the main character–Megan Armstrong–is recalling a violent episode with her partner in which she strugglesd to get free of his grip, turned, and fell to the bottom of a flight of stairs. She got away with a bad bruise, but as she looked back up the stairs, searching “for a consoling hand or gesture,” she saw that “gratification dripped from his pores and his eyes gleamed with pride.” This was a terrible experience and Megan’s haunting memory and feelings of helplessness plead with us for understanding and sympathy.
Why, then, did I have a queasy feeling about her almost from the beginning? For one thing, Dawson has set this up tidily with two descriptions of Megan gazing out the dirty train window. In the first, she finds great comfort in the landscape: “Beyond an intermittent hedge was a vast green space where horses grazed, cattle were driven along a country lane, and birds swooped overhead.” Sounds like all those Renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden.
Only a few pages later, Megan sees that “next to the railway line were dilapidated industrial buildings with boarded-up windows, spray-painted walls with sketches and slogans, and disused car parks and wasteland overrun with weeds and broken concrete. Glass bottles had been smashed, littering the ground with small fragments, and cans and takeaway wrappers congregated in bushes and along a wall.”
I couldn’t avoid the comparison to Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of hell.
Soon after this, we find Megan jumping restlessly from her seat to roam the aisles and when a man passing her in the opposite direction accidentally bumps into her, her response is, “Watch what you’re doing, you idiot!” Then she makes eye contact with an apparently harmless young woman who Megan imagines has “averted her gaze.” Megan goes back to her seat, “scowling.”
In every case, of course, the point isn’t the landscape or her fellow passengers but Megan herself and her erratic, overblown responses to everything and everyone she encounters.
The third person narrator presents us with a main character who is, at best, unreliable. We don’t quite trust her. Then a perfectly friendly man sits down and “her skin tingled with cold as a deep sense of familiarity emerged” He has no such recognition, but then it turns out she is moving to Rodley, the town where he lives. She then feels “not threatened but comforted” by his staring at her. Back and forth, chilled one minute, comforted the next.
Megan begins to experience a kind of deja vu and recalls details of this town she’s never visited.
The story in Girl on a Train is exciting, suspenseful, captivating; I believe this book could define the term, “page turner.” But its real strength, for this old English teacher, is in its development of complex characters who are neither heroes nor villains, who intrigue us and startle us and are never predictable.
And, finally, into this mix walks Luke Adams, himself not an uncomplicated character, himself the title character in an impressive series of mysteries that begins here– Girl on a Train: Luke Adams Investigates, Book I.
After that, we are bombarded with a cast that could easily overwhelm and confuse were it not for Dawson’s skillful introduction of just the kind of detail that makes each one clear and distinct.
But the roster of names is worth considering since much further exploration of who’s who and who does what to whom would constitute a Spoiler of the First Degree.
And so, we meet:
Ben, Larry, Joshua, Andrew, Verity, Saskia, Jane, Julie, Frank Fox, Ron, Imogen.
Who is important? Who is a red herring? Who can we trust? Who must Megan avoid?
Who is Megan?
Megan wades deeper and deeper into her own past as she strives to make a future in the now haunting village of Rodley, suddenly peopled by ghosts.
Read This Book.
It’s a thrill a minute, a puzzle, a twist around every corner in the almost mythical Rodley, as we follow the disturbing and disturbed Megan on her strange journey.
If you enjoy it as much as I did, you will move quickly to the rest of the Luke Adams mysteries. And be glad to have discovered them. This one’s a winner for all fans of psychological British mysteries. 
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