Rock Music, Suspense, Dark Thriller: HOLD ME DOWN by Clea Simon

Clea Simon's deep dives into the crime, pain, and heroics of Boston's club music world gave a fierce and dark passion to her crime novel World Enough (2017). With HOLD ME  DOWN, Simon goes multiple layers deeper and darker—thanks to the persona of Gal, a scarred and angry woman who has held crowds in the palm of her hand as she belted out the lyrics of her own top songs, mic stand and the strings of the bass as much a part of her as her own vocal cords and rough screams of rage and sexuality.

For Gal, a Boston return, 20 years later, is fraught with potential failure. Taking a cameo role in a club performance, she falters at first, realizing the guitarist is "all metal and speed, still" -- can Gal keep up? But she finds out right away: "The move centers her ... belting out the chorus as well as she knows the tattoo on her wrist—an F clef, faded blue—as the song pours out of her, the words coming easily now. Winding up to the hook. The line with the hiccup. One extra beat that makes the rhyme different." And she's back in charge of the image she's been ready to project, of a woman and a band grown tougher with age, "blooded, in ways they can only imagine." It's about power, sexuality, control.

And then, with one tricky glimpse for a moment of a face in the crowd, she's rubbed raw again, and in danger.

Scenes of touring, of the drug-supported physical challenge of performing for one crowd after another, clawing up the charts, the band becoming a life form of its own: Simon peels these like layers of a sharp onion, tears and rage starting to flow with Gal's slow recognition of the deep punishment she's sustained in her life. Her best songs—including the iconic "Hold Me Down"—root in that festering pain and anger that only her closest friends have even a hint of. 

"That song, 'Hold Me Down,' had been their breakout. Their hit, even in the rough four-track version they'd recorded down at Randy's, burning up the college stations with a waiting list for the single. Fans asking at the record store whenever she dropped back in to pick up a shift. It was why the suits had come calling, taking the shuttle up from New York to hear them at the Rat, the Channel, Taji's."

With the "suits" had come the controllers, the people who shoved the band at a pace beyond human capacity, drugging them as needed, pressing them into alcohol and drug abuse and a demand for performance that's deadly in its effects.

As the 20-years-later brutal murder of one of the team confronts her, so long after the band's success, Gal slowly admits to herself why the killing happened and who has deliberately done damage to her and the others. Then the police get involved, demanding that she reveal information she's barely coming to terms with. "You could come in and speak with us, if you'd like. Or should I send someone to get you?" That's the investigator. And Gal replies that she'll come in, without being dragged—admitting, in that moment, that her choices are "all about control."

But you can't control what brutal crime does to you. You can only cling to your friends and what's left of who you thought you were, and keep going. Or not. 

Simon's pacing in this crime thriller offers more than plot and character: She reincarnates the demanding sexuality of the rock underground with the costs of fame and addiction. Page by page, scene by traumatic scene, there's no guarantee that Gal can even perceive a safe harbor. 

Anyone who's dreamed of the power of being a rock performer will get double the emotional kick from this raw and compelling suspense novel. Simon's particular genius in HOLD ME DOWN is shining her light into the world of tough, struggling, and brilliant women—a side of the rock world rarely acknowledged or envisioned. HOLD ME DOWN is a heartache packed into 248 pages, with the possibility of breaking always just within reach.

After multiple genres of mysteries and crime novels, this Boston-area author has come into her own, so that Gal yells the words so many have had in the back of their throats, an accusation: "You wanna, you wanna hold me down." It's all about how we fight back. Can Gal do it—and survive?

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.