The police procedural is well-worn path: TV has taught us to dust for epithelials and rely on the gut instincts of the rest of the team, books have taught us that detectives need to be hard drinking, fast-talking womanisers. With Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross’ much-lauded first novel, he takes a brave new approach and introduces a level of claustrophobia and introspection lacking elsewhere in the genre.

Mr. Peanut focuses on the joy and sorrows of marriage as experienced by David and Alice Pepin, a wealthy childless couple. Alice battles with severe food allergies, obesity and depression. David fantasises about her death. Until the day he returns home to find her hand poised suicidally over a bag of peanuts, which she eats, and dies instantly of anaphylactic shock. Or at least that’s the story that he tells the two detectives, Hastroll and Sheppard, who turn up to investigate the death.

From there on in, the book takes a turn, becoming more concerned with the backstory of David and Alice, particularly their ongoing battle with Alice’s depression brought on by her miscarriages, the most severe of which takes place on a flight to Hawaii. It’s in Hawaii we are first introduced to a strange character called Mobius, who looks after them in Hawaii, and may or may not be a hit man hired by David.

Hastroll and Sheppard dispense the sort of hard-boiled wisdom we’ve come to expect from New York cops: no-holds-barred tirades on love and death, all based on personal experience. This occurs in what’s essentially a short story within the overall story.

Rather than these layers and turns within the overall narrative becoming too confusing or making the whole experience seem like a challenge, the machinations illuminate a deftly told story, packed with humour, angst and claustrophobia. The blurb on the book jacket describes it as a ‘police procedural of the soul’ and the book doesn’t disappoint. Ross succeeds in drawing us into the world inhabited by David, Alice, Hastroll, Sheppard and Mobius and when we are there we are captivated by his storytelling and his ability to create a novel which is simultaneously light and dark.

First novels can often create a benchmark for an author that subsequent books fail to live up to, let’s hope this is merely the beginning of a canon of great work from Adam Ross.

Reviewed by Scott Morris

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