Healing from a traumatic experience can take a long time. And everyone goes through the process in a slightly different way, so there’s not just one road to recovery. Because of that, it can be difficult to portray the process effectively in a crime novel. Readers don’t want to get bogged down in too much description, and most readers don’t want to feel they’re wallowing in someone’s misery. At the same time, to deny the difficulty of healing can make a story seem less believable (e.g., ‘You expect me to believe she goes back to work a few days after that happened?’). So, it’s a challenge for an author.

Some authors face that challenge by implying, but not detailing, the process of healing. For example, in Agatha Christie’s Sad Cypress, Elinor Carlisle is accused of murdering Mary Gerrard. She had motive, but that doesn’t mean she’s guilty. She is arrested and charged, though, and bound over for trial. The local GP, Dr. Peter Lord, wants her name cleared, because he’s fallen in love with her. So, he asks Hercule Poirot to investigate, and Poirot agrees. The whole process is traumatic for Elinor, as was the death itself. At the end of the novel, Elinor goes to a sanatorium to recover from the experience. Christie doesn’t mention how long she’s there, what treatment she receives, etc., but it’s clear that it will take some time for her to heal.

In some series, a character has traumatic experience in one book, and then in the next book, the character is working through the healing process or returns after some time away. That’s what happens, for instance, in Katheryn Fox’s Anya Crichton series. Anya is a pathologist/forensic physician who lives and works in New South Wales. In the first novel, Malicious Intent, she works with Detective Seargent (DS) Kate Farrar to solve a series of unusual deaths that end up being linked. Catching the killer is difficult, and for Kate, it’s traumatic. Fox doesn’t go into a great deal of detail about the healing process, but in the second novel, Without Consent, we are told that Kate returns to active duty after a three-month hiatus. That lends credibility to the series, as one would expect someone to need a lot of time for healing.

We see a similar sort of thing in Cat Connor’s Killerbyte, the first of her novels featuring FBI agent Gabrielle ‘Ellie’ Conway. In the novel, Ellie, her partner Mac, and her FBI teammates solve the bizarre and ugly case of a killer dubbed ‘Son of Shakespeare,’ who leaves notes with poetry near his victims. It’s especially traumatic for Ellie, because the killer leaves the notes and bodies for her, specifically, to find. Even though she and the team solve the case, that doesn’t mean it’s over, so to speak. In Terrorbyte, the next novel in the series, she’s still having flashbacks to that case, and still having some other symptoms of PTSD. She’s a strong character, so she doesn’t completely buckle under, but it still takes time for her to process what happened.

In Håkan Östlundh’s The Intruder, we are introduced to police detective Fredrik Borman, who lives and works in Gotland. In the novel, he’s just returning to active duty after a two-year absence during which he was recovering from a terrible accident. He’s still not completely physically healed, and his work colleagues aren’t exactly sure how to treat him. It’s obvious, too, that his family dynamics have changed. While he was incapacitated, his wife Ninni managed everything. Now that he’s ready to resume his life again, their patterns will have to be renegotiated, and that can be tricky. Even so, he’s well enough now that he and his police partner Sara Oskarsson are able to work the case of a disturbing and later, tragic, series of events that happen to the family of Malin Andersson and her husband Henrik Kjellander.

Anthony Bidulka’s Going to Beautiful is the story of Toronto-based celebrity chef Jake Hardy. He and his husband, fashion designer Eddie Kravetz, have what seems to be a perfect life. They have plenty of money, are well-regarded in their fields, and have a grown son they both love. Then, Eddie dies after a tragic fall from the balcony of their condominium. At first, Jake’s in shock, as anyone would be. Then, it’s determined that Eddie was murdered. The police consider Jake a ‘person of interest,’ but his name is soon cleared. That doesn’t aease the pain though. It takes some time before Jake is able to function at all, let alone move forward in his life, and that’s depicted effectively in the novel. As a way of coming to terms with his loss, and of finding out more about his husband, Jake decides to take a trip to Eddie’s hometown of Beautiful, Saskatchewan. There, he meets Eddie’s family and hometown friends, and learns things about Eddie that he didn’t know. He also finds out who killed Eddie and why. Most importantly, though, he begins to get ready to heal. It’s a long process, and it’s not glossed over in the book.

And that’s the thing about traumatic events. They may happen in a moment or less, but recovering and moving on from them can take a lot longer. It takes skill to depict that in a novel without overburdening the reader.

*NOTE: The title of this post is a line from Billy Joel’s Code of Silence.