Reading Matters

'My Last Confession' by Helen FitzGerald

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 272 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Helen FitzGerald is an Australian writer based in Glasgow, Scotland. My Last Confession, her second novel, is billed as "intelligent chick-lit" although I'm not sure it entirely fits into that genre, because it's also a thriller and has a dark noir-ish edge running through it. Littered as it is with drugs, violence, incest and male rape, this is no fluffy, comforting read, but an electrifying one that will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens next.

The story is narrated by Krissie, a single mum who's spent the past couple of years living in her parent's spare bedroom with her artist boyfriend Chas, while they get their lives in order. Now determined to forge a new life together, the couple move out and Krissie lands herself a job as a "criminal justice social worker", more commonly known as a parole officer.

Things start well when she exposes a client's secret plan to live with the children he is convicted of sexually abusing when he is released from prison. "With my first pre-release meeting fresh in my mind, I felt on top of the world, ready for anything," she says. "Hell, I was shit hot." 

But it's her second client, a man accused of murdering his mother-in-law, which lands her in hot water. Convinced that he couldn't possibly have committed such a gruesome, brutal crime, Krissie does a spot of private investigating that puts her life and the lives of her loved ones in danger. Or, as she puts it on the first page, in her "tips for parole officers":

1. Don't smuggle heroin into prison.
2. Don't drink vodka to relieve stress.
3. Don't French-kiss a colleague to get your boyfriend jealous.
4. Don't snort speed.
5. Don't spend more time with murderers than with your son.
6. Don't invite crack-head clients to your party.

I raced through this book in two sittings. Krissie is a quirky kind of character, in many respects too naive for her own good. But it is her hire-wire act in which she struggles to come to grips with a new job while looking after a young child and trying not to jeopardise her relationship with Chas that makes her incredibly realistic. And despite her obvious flaws, she's immensely likable helped by a very wicked self-deprecating sense of humour.

But what makes My Last Confession really work is not just the easy-flowing narrative (which occasionally switches into third-person) and great characterisation, but FitzGerald's ability to shock the reader. On one page you can read about Krissie's dreams of wearing a white wedding dress and on the next have the brutal intricacies of a woman being butchered thrust in your face. And the ending, which delivers a nice punch, ties everything up neatly and succinctly, making this a terrific and satisfying crime thriller, highly reminiscent of my old fave, Nicci French.

I'm now looking forward to reading FitzGerald's debut novel, Dead Lovely, and her latest hardcover, The Devil's Staircase, to see if she can maintain this high level of momentum.

'In the Wake of the Boatman' by Jonathon Scott Fuqua

Fiction - hardcover; Bancroft Press; 308 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The tension between fathers and sons is a much-explored theme in literary fiction, but few present such a tangled, complicated, emotionally crippled relationship as the one depicted in Jonathon Scott Fuqua's In The Wake of the Boatman.

From the very first page it's clear that the relationship between Carl Hatcher Steward and his son, Puttnam Douglas, is going to be a lifelong problematic one. It's 1942, the USA is in the throes of a world war, and Puttnam has just been born.

Days later Helen and the newborn finally arrived home, yet Carl's anxieties did not abate. Alone in the gray living room of their clapboard rental, their four-year-old daughter asleep in bed, Carl's thoughts crudely took him off guard. On this oppressive Norfolk evening, the notion came to him so calmly it almost made sense. He should crack his little boy's neck as gently as possible. It would be like saving two lives.

This is an important glimpse inside Carl's dark heart. He's a damaged man who seems unable to love his son. Why? Because he's ashamed that he has brought a child into the world at a time when "another mouth to feed would not help the war effort" and humiliated because his dodgy knee means he cannot join the Army.

By the time VE Day arrives, three years later, Carl's hardness has not thawed: he finds himself in tears because it suddenly dawns on him that he does not know how to give his son a hug.

It seemed a completely different act from hugging his wife or daughter. He had gone over to his son with intentions of hugging him, but in the end, hadn't been able to. Suddenly he felt old, worn, and permanently immovable. He was in a groove too deep to change. 'Jesus,' he cried softly to himself. He grasped his nose with his fingers and held his breath.

And yet, despite this acknowledgment of his emotional failings, Carl seems unable to do anything about it. Some 15 years later, as he drives his son to college, it's obvious that he blames Putt for his own failings. "I've given you a toughness that will carry you through a lifetime unscathed. I've given you everything I could," he tells him, before adding: "You've never tried very hard to please me. You've made it impossible for me to really love you."

'You're a curse. You're a curse to your mother and me. What have I done to deserve this kind of curse?'
He stared at Putt, as if his son, at that moment, had been floating a few feet about the Ford's bench seat. 'I don't understand you. You won't let me understand you.'
Putt glowered at his father. 'You think it's just me? That I'm not allowing you to understand me?' He laughed.
'It's not me,' Carl said, looking ahead at the road, at the hills that were growing longer.
'You think it's me,' Puttnam said again. 'Nothing's your fault?'
'Yep.'

Any wonder, then, that Putt cuts all ties with his father? Their estrangement serves to fuel Putt's desire to be successful, and he graduates, becomes an infantryman in the United States Army and later a decorated hero in the Vietnam War.  All the while he keeps in touch with his older sister, Mary, a strikingly beautiful woman who marries a man with more than a passing resemblance to Carl, and his affectionate if slightly scatty mother (interestingly, she calls him "Mama's boy").

On the surface Putt is a strong, attractive man, but underneath he's scrabbling to come to terms with a homosexual dalliance in college and a penchant for cross-dressing. These two secrets, if exposed, will destroy him and so, the anxiety, the disgust and the shame of it, build and build. It is only when his aged father falls ill that he must face the truth about himself, whatever the consequences.

If this sounds like a dark, complicated tale, then you'd be right. But there's something quite beautiful and devastating about this book, which never resorts to melodrama to convey the tortured, ambiguous nature of Carl and Putt's relationship, nor Putt's confused sexuality.

The story is told in the third person -- mainly from Putt's point-of-view -- and moves so quickly that time seems distorted. You can turn a page and suddenly find the narrative has moved ahead by years without any real explanation of what's happened in between. But this is not a quibble. I like Scott Fuqua's tendency to let Putt's secrets remain just that. While we come to learn that Putt is confused by his sexuality and ashamed of his desire to wear women's clothes behind closed doors, these are not laboured and remain hazy, sketchy events, which make them all the more mysterious and intriguing.

By contrast, the formative event in his young life -- when he accidentally puts a boy's eye out with a rock at a local swimming pool when he was just six years old -- is mentioned many times, I think because it symbolises Putt's confused feelings over his masculinity: he's proud of this one act that proves he can stand up for himself, and yet he's also ashamed of the violence of it.

In the Wake of the Boatman -- the title refers to Carl, the backyard boatman, who builds his own craft that sink upon launch -- is the kind of book I did not expect to like. But I found it totally absorbing, incredibly realistic and emotionally hard-hitting. I read it more than six weeks ago and I'm still thinking about it, which may partly explain why this review has been such a long time coming.

As an aside, I have to say the names of the characters in this book are amongst some of the weirdest I've ever come across. If Puttnam wasn't unusual enough, how about these: Milton Pilterpuss, Bertrand Capote, Percy Dishbrower and Thane Forgit. They almost sound computer-generated.

'In the Woods' by Tana French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 464 pages; 2008.

When I first picked up Tana French's In The Woods at JFK airport on my last trip to New York last October I envisaged it would tread similar territory to Edna O'Brien's dark, claustrophobic In the Forest. After all, they're both Irish crime books by Irish writers (who, in my opinion, even look alike, almost as if they are mother and daughter) with much the same titles, but that's where the similarities end. 

In the Woods lacks the literary flourishes that made O'Brien's book somewhat difficult to read; instead you get a completely absorbing, rocket-fuelled narrative that zips along at Formula One pace. I read this in about two days while on a recent trip to Ireland and found myself thinking about the storyline long after I'd finished the book and repacked it in my suitcase.

The story, a police procedural, is told from the perspective of Rob Ryan, a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad (which, by the way, does not exist in real life), who has a secret past that only his immediate family knows about. When he was a young boy he was playing with two friends in the local woods, but when dusk arrived none of them returned for their evening meal and a search party was organised. Rob was found clinging to a tree with blood-filled shoes, so traumatised by whatever had happened to him and his friends that he was unable to recall a single detail. His friends were never found, and 20 years on, Rob is still unable to remember what happened.

This troubled history comes rushing to the fore, when Rob and his colleague, Cassie Maddox, are assigned a murder investigation involving a 12-year-old girl whose body is found near the very same woods from Rob's childhood. Are the crimes linked? Could the perpetrator be the same person responsible for the disappearance of Rob's friends?

This is the crux of this superbly realistic debut novel -- and to say anything more would ruin the plot for those who have not yet read it.

What I liked most about this book is that it doesn't come with a neat, well-rounded conclusion, which makes the story seem even more authentic, because how many murder investigations have neat, well-rounded conclusions? It makes you think, makes you fill in the gaps, makes you come up with your own theories and I cannot understand those readers who think they've been short-changed by this -- and judging by the reviews of Amazon there's quite a few.

My only quibble -- and it's a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things -- is the "voice" of Rob Ryan, which didn't seem authentically male to me, but perhaps that was a deliberate device to explain why he got on so well with his female counterpart. In fact I couldn't quite work out how I felt about their platonic, almost sibling-like relationship, because as much as it provided additional depth to the storyline, at other times it came across as slightly too cloying. Had neither of these characters discovered the concept of "me time", I wondered.

In the Woods recently won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and I'm not surprised. It's an astonishingly well written book by a first time author, one that grips you from various different angles -- will Rob's secret be discovered; will Rob have a nervous breakdown from the emotional, psychological stress of the investigation; what happened to his missing friends that fateful day in 1984; what happened to the girl who was murdered more recently? -- and provides plenty of red herrings and dodgy clues, so that it's almost impossible to guess the outcome. And the period details -- of Ireland in 1984 and the vastly different New Ireland (before the very recent collapse of the Celtic Tiger) in 2004 -- make the story seem particularly believable.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this one, and will eagerly eat up her next one, The Likeness, which is lying in wait on my bedside table...

'Until It's Over' by Nicci French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 380 pages; 2009.

Proving that you should never judge a book by it's cover (because surely this is the dullest cover I've seen in a long while), Until It's Over is another fine psychological thriller by the husband-and-wife writing team of Nicci French.

Set in London, it tells the story of Astrid Bell, a cycle courier, who survives a nasty accident in which her bicycle slams into the open door of her neighbour's car. Nothing particularly strange there, but the next day her neighbour is found dead, savagely beaten and hidden behind some garbage dumpsters, and immediately suspicion falls on Astrid.

When, several days later, Astrid is dispatched to a client's house to collect a package from a wealthy woman, such suspicion is ratcheted up a few knots. Why?  Because Astrid attends the house only to discover the woman lying face down in the hallway, her face disfigured by ugly knife wounds.

The police immediately assume Astrid is the culprit, because she is the only obvious link between the two murders. And then, just as Astrid's pleads that it is nothing but a co-incidence, someone else to whom she is linked turns up dead... 

Unlike French's latest offering, the somewhat implausible What To Do When Someone Dies

which I read last month, this one rings very true. It's set in a house share in Hackney, North London, and French has peopled it with believable characters, all of whom could be the likely culprit.

As ever, Astrid is a typical French character, a confident young woman with everything to live for, who suddenly finds her life taking a dramatic, dark twist: someone is deliberately killing people she knows, either to scare her or implicate her, and there seems little she can do about it.

What I didn't expect as I ploughed through this novel, anxious to discover the ending, was the sudden switch in narrator half-way through. French has done this before -- in her 2005 novel Catch Me When I Fall -- but this time it feels especially creepy, because now we begin to see events through the eyes of the killer. Initially, I found this change in point-of-view slightly jarring, but the narrator's voice is so chilling and believable, that it soon came to pass. It does mean that most of the narrative is re-told from the murderer's perspective, but this is no boring rehash of the storyline: you get to see exactly how -- and why -- the murders took place, and it's not what you might expect.

The ending is suitably dramatic, too, and after such a slow build-up of tension over the previous 300-plus pages is it any wonder I felt a little wrung out by it all. This is a terrific thriller, and if you've not read any Nicci French before it's a good a place to start as any.

'What To Do When Someone Dies' by Nicci French

 

Fiction - hardcover; Penguin; 352 pages; 2009.

I'm a sucker for a good psychological thriller and there's no one better to deliver a thoroughly entertaining romp than Nicci French, the pseudonym for the writing partnership of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French.

The duo's latest novel What To Do When Someone Dies delivers what you would normally expect from the French "franchise" -- a suspenseful story that keeps one reading late into the night. But in this instance the narrative, while tautly written and providing all the French trademarks -- a paranoid woman whom no one believes is telling the truth -- there's something slightly unbelievable about it all, with very little ringing true.

The premise is a good one though. A 34-year-old woman, Ellie, is told that her husband has died in a car accident. A female passenger, thought to be his mistress, has also died. But Ellie, wracked by grief, is convinced that Greg could not have been having an affair and embarks on an elaborate "investigation" to prove to her family and friends that he was murdered. Along the way her behaviour becomes increasingly paranoid and abnormal, to the point where the police consider her a suspect in a separate crime that develops in the latter third of the story.

Typically, Ellie is your normal Nicci French character -- young, articulate, domesticated and surrounded by lovely friends -- which makes the drama of her situation all the more heightened. But for the most part I had to totally suspend belief otherwise I'm afraid I might have thrown this book against the wall from sheer frustration. Ellie not only does a whole lot of stupid things -- and seemingly gets away with them -- she doesn't really behave as one would expect a grief-stricken widow to behave.

And there are little holes in the plot that annoyed me. For instance, Ellie runs out of money and food, but still manages to travel on the London Underground every day and go for drinks with her friends. She's also lost her husband but her parents are nowhere to be seen. And the family of her husband's supposed mistress don't seem in the least interested in her -- surely they would be just as curious as her about the affair?

Finally, the book also takes a damn long time to get going, although when it does take off, about two-thirds of the way in, it is relentless in increasing the tension to almost unbearable proportions. The ending, when it comes, is not so much predictable but kind of lame, as if the writers had reached their page quota and need to wrap things up quickly.

On the whole, this is an exciting if somewhat implausible thriller. And without wishing to damn it with faint praise, What To Do When Someone Dies kept me entertained in my sick bed earlier this week, which is more that you can say for a lot of other thrillers on the market.

'Wanting' by Richard Flanagan

Fiction – hardcover; Random House Australia; 252 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

There's something quite ironic about wanting a book called Wanting so much that when you finally get your grubby little mitts on it you find you're not really in the right frame of mood to read it -- and perhaps you didn't want it that much after all. But having cajoled the Australian publisher into sending me a review copy on the basis that I'm an expat Australian I couldn't exactly leave this one on the pile indefinitely, and so I recently unearthed it and began to read...

In this novel Flanagan returns to his state of birth, Tasmania, and sets his story in the 1830s. We've been here before, of course, in Flanagan's third novel, Gould's Book of Fish, but this one has a dual narrative set in England in 1851, which adds an extra level of complexity.

There are famous people in this book, too, real characters from history that many readers will be familiar with: Sir John Franklin, who was governor of Tasmania between 1836 and 1843, but is better known for his exploration of North America and the Arctic, including his ill-fated expedition to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage; and Charles Dickens, the English novelist, who was briefly obsessed with Arctic exploration and staged a play, The Frozen Deep, in Manchester in collaboration with Wilkie Collins, and cast himself in the star role.

A third historical figure, much less known, is the young aboriginal girl, Mathinna, who was "adopted" by the Franklins in Tasmania as a kind of experiment to prove that the "savage" could be "tamed" and "civilised". It's an experiment which fails dismally, not because of any wrong doing by Mathinna, but because the social constructs and beliefs of the time were stacked against her.

These twin narratives, 12 years apart, are told in alternating chapters and are linked by Franklin's wife, Lady Jane. She knew the novelist Dickens and enlisted him to defend her missing husband's reputation when he was accused, in the press, of having resorted to cannibalism during his Northwest Passage expedition from whence he'd never returned.

But despite a book peopled by historical figures, Flanagan points out in his Author's Note that "this novel is not a history, nor should it be read as one". He adds:

The stories of Mathinna and Dickens, with their odd but undeniable connection, suggested to me a meditation on desire -- the cost of its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs. That, and not history, is the true subject of Wanting.

Taking this into account, the book is a superb exploration of this theme. The Dickens portrayed here is slightly crazed and very lonely, caught in a loveless marriage which mirrors "the cold whiteness of the Northwest Passage".

He continued with his marriage. He continued to believe that, like everything else in his life, it would be righted by the sheer force of his will. He had trouble staying in the same room as his wife, but he stayed nevertheless. He continued to argue in his writing for domesticity, and tried not to think that perhaps this was the very thing in his life that had escaped him, that perhaps it did not really exist, or, if it did, it was just one more prison bar.

And Mathinna, whom captures the attentions of Lady Jane Franklin upon her arrival in Wybalenna, Tasmania -- "Why, look, you could almost wish to hold the little wild beast and pet her" -- spends the rest of her life caught between cultures and wants nothing more than to fit in. When she eventually returns to her own people, the juxtaposition is evident.

[...] she spoke in a manner that was neither white nor black, but in a strange way with strange words that made no sense to anyone. Who was this girl? Why did she talk this way, why this strange wavering voice?

At times this is a heart-breaking read, but there was something about Wanting that didn't really gel with me -- and I'm at odds to put my finger on exactly what this was.

Having read three of Flanagan's previous novels, I consider him one of the finest writers in Australia, which is why I was eager to read this latest offering. There's no doubt that the scene setting is vivid, that the characterisation is strong, that the writing is typically beautiful (although he seems to have lost his penchant for overly long sentences in this one), and yet it didn't particularly "grab" me in the same way as The Sound of One Hand Clapping or the Unknown Terrorist did.

And maybe it's the dual narrative that lost me, because while both strands are excellent stories in their own right, putting them together in the one book doesn't allow enough room for either to properly breathe. No sooner would I get to grips with one story, than I'd have to flip a switch in my brain and start reading about the next, and then do it all over again when I got to the end of the chapter. This makes for a slightly bumpy read rather than a streamlined one.

All the same, if you are intrigued by either Franklin or Dickens, or maybe even both, you will probably very much enjoy this book -- although you may not necessarily like what you find out about either character.

'The Fire Gospel' by Michel Faber

  Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 213 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

The Fire Gospel, due to be published on November 6, is the long-awaited novel from the author of the oh-so delicious (and my favourite book of the year so far) The Crimson Petal and The White.

This new book is part of Canongate's The Myths series, launched in 2005, in which "some of the world's most respected authors re-tell myths in a manner of their own choosing". The Fire Gospel is therefore a reworking of the myth of Prometheus, who supposedly brought the gift of fire to humanity against the wishes of Zeus, who said fire belonged to the gods alone. As punishment Prometheus was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten by an eagle. Charming.

In Faber's hands, the myth takes on a much more modern, and occasionally hilarious, focus. While on a trip to war-torn Iraq, Theo Griepenkerl, an academic from Canada, accidentally discovers nine papyrus scrolls that have lain hidden for two thousand years. He smuggles them back to Toronto and begins to translate them from Aramaic. They turn out to be a secret, never-before-published fifth gospel that has the power to turn Christianity on its head.

Eager for publicity -- and untold riches -- Theo seeks out a publisher willing to take a risk on publishing his sensational discovery. But when every mainstream press turns him down he has to resort to convincing the relatively obscure text-book publisher Elysium that it's worth printing. This is despite the fact that the firm's biggest bestseller so far has been Sing Times Seven, a book written by a Norwegian school teacher about games parents should play with their children to teach them arithmetic.

 'My book isn't about teaching dogs geometry,' Theo reminded him. 'For God's sake, Mr Baum, it's a new Gospel! It's a previously unknown account of the life and death of Jesus, written in Aramaic, the language Jesus himself spoke. In fact, it will be the only Gospel written in Aramaic: the others are in Greek. And it's earlier than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, years earlier. I can't understand why publishers aren't falling over themselves to put it out -- 99.99 per cent of books aren't important, not really. This one is."

When The Fifth Gospel is eventually published, sales go through the roof and Theo becomes a celebrity doing the rounds of talk shows and author signings. Some of the funniest bits occur when Theo checks the reader reviews on Amazon, complete with misspellings and untempered opinions:

Julia Argandona, of Costa Mesa, CA, offered the following appreciation (which '17 of 59' customers apparently found 'helpful'): I haven't read this book yet but I can't wait to read it so I am reviewing it early. The other people on Amazon who say don't read it are brainwashed stooges of the Catholic religion, which has been sexually abusing children for 100's of years. Who needs it? I already LOVE this book.

But it doesn't take long before the wrath of Christians and other religious groups puts his life in danger. He might not have to endure the whole eagles-pecking-his-liver torture to which Prometheus was subjected, but it's not far off...

I laughed a lot while reading this book. It's wicked and provocative. But in some respects it feels a bit too knowing, a bit too clever (I hesitate to use the term smart alec). I got the sense that Faber wasn't just poking fun at religion but was also taking a pop at the publishing game, specifically its obsession with sales figures and marketing. Us readers get a bit of a drubbing too.

The Fire Gospel is a fun read, but it is definitely not in the same league as Faber's previous masterpiece, The Crimson Petal and The White. And if you are religious and easily offended by Jesus spoofs you'd best avoid it altogether.

'The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories' by Michel Faber

   Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 199 pages; 2006.

Having loved Michel Faber's epic Victorian drama The Crimson Petal and the White when I read it recently, I decided to hunt out the sequel. Except The Apple is not actually a sequel but a collection of short stories about characters that featured in The Crimson Petal and the White. As the author points out in the foreword, "You needn't have read that book in order to appreciate this one. The stories are, as stories should be, little worlds of their own".

While I can't disagree with this, I do think it helps if you're at least familiar with the "original" book because it puts the stories into context. And part of the joy of reading The Apple is becoming re-acquainted with characters you already know and love, or, in some cases, rather detest!

This collection is obviously far less ambitious in scope than Faber's magnus opus -- it's less than 200 pages and the typeface in my edition is especially large, for a start --  but it still captures the very essence of Victorian London which made the first book such a wonderful, evocative read.

There are seven stories all told, and each one features a key figure first introduced in The Crimson Petal. However, all is not as it might seem: this is not a chronological follow-on. Instead, we get glimpses of some character's lives before we first met them and others we meet several years down the line.

If you want to know what happens to William Rackham and his kidnapped daughter, Sophie, then you won't be disappointed. But if you're dying to find out what happened to the prostitute Sugar -- and judging by Faber's foreward, he got boxes of letters from frustrated readers demanding just that -- then it's no secret to say you're not going to get any closure here. While Sugar does feature in the opening story Christmas in Silver Street, this is a story about her younger self.

Other familiar characters that star in their own short story include the maid Clara, Mr Bodley and Emmaline Fox. 

Each story is a quick, satisfying read, but taken as a whole this is not the type of book that can in any way represent or recreate the wondrous beauty of the 833-page novel that inspired it. This is really for diehard fans only and even then you may find it a little disappointing. (I did, however, very much enjoy the 11-page foreword in which Faber shares some of the very many letters he received upon publication of The Crimson Petal, but whether it's worth buying this collection just for that isn't really for me to say.)

'The Crimson Petal and the White' by Michel Faber

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 833 pages; 2003.

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is, quite simply, an astounding literary accomplishment. Within its 800-plus pages unfolds a story that draws the reader into another time and place so expertly that you feel as if you, too, are treading the streets of Victorian-era London.

Critics have quite rightly compared Faber's epic novel with that other great Victorian writer Charles Dickens, but as Kathryn Hughes pointed out in the Guardian this one is not tempered by the social mores that prevented Dickens from writing freely. Faber's book, a 21st century novel set in the 19th century, is lewd and bawdy, gritty and real, and there's no pretense at keeping things in check lest he offend a delicate reader.

Indeed, one could argue that delicate readers should probably steer clear of this epic tale about a prostitute's rise and fall in Victorian England. His central character, 19-year-old Sugar, is infamous for turning the kinds of tricks other whores refuse to do. And while Faber may not go into great detail regarding those tricks, he certainly does not shy away from letting us into the sordid, carnal world of an 1870s streetwalker. The language can, at times, be very crude -- and if you are offended by the "C-word" you'd be wise to stay away.

But despite the constant debauchery (for want of a better word) that fills the pages, The Crimson Petal and the White never feels pornographic, nor sensationalist. Instead, because Faber has such an eye for detail and is a stickler for historical accuracy, the novel feels like an intoxicating trip into a world that few of us could ever hope -- or want -- to visit.

The London he describes is rich and vivid, peppered with beggars and street urchins, while the constant stench of human waste and horse dung fills the air.

Cabs are trotting backwards and forwards, thickly bearded gentlemen in dark clothing dash across their path, sandwich-board men patrol the gutters and, over there, a trio of street-sweepers are standing over a drain, cramming the accumulated porridge of snow-slush, dirt and horse-dung down through the grille with jabs of their brooms. Even as they toil, an equipage bristling with provincial businessmen jingles by, leaving a steamy festoon of turd in its wake.

The story is set over the course of 1875. It begins with William Rackham, the reluctant heir to a perfumery business, hunting out the services of a notorious whore whose name he discovered in an annual brothel directory. When he eventually meets the alluring Sugar, he finds himself as equally attracted to her brain as to her body.

Sugar, as it turns out, is more than the sum of her parts. She's a would-be writer working on a novel about a woman who carries out the most gruesome acts of revenge on the men who have paid to sleep with her. Sugar is also highly intelligent but has simply never been given the opportunity to rise above the mire to which she's become accustomed.

Over the course of many rendezvous, Sugar and William establish an easy rapport, both in the bed and out of it, and before long William finds that the relationship has given him the impetus he needs to take control of the perfumery business he had so long despised. When he begins making his fortune, he "buys" Sugar and installs her in a secret pad, supplying her with a weekly wage and all the material possessions she could ever hope for.

But all is not well at home. His wife is going mad and his young daughter's governess is planning on leaving the household. Likewise, Sugar is desperately lonely and begins to wonder if her sexual powers over William are beginning to wane...

She's tired of waiting for William. Days go by without a visit; then, when he does call on her, he has a mind full of concerns from his secret life -- secret from her, that is. All his friends and family know him better than she, and they haven't any use for the knowledge; it's so unfair!

To say much more would mean revealing crucial plot spoilers, which I am loathe to do, but essentially both characters hatch plots -- with drastic and unpredictable consequences -- to ensure that they can continue to stay together as a kind of surreptitious "husband and wife".

Intertwined with this major narrative thread is a series of other minor storylines involving secondary characters which serve to make the book an especially rich, multi-layered read.

There's William's brother, Henry, a pious would-be preacher and his will-they-or-won't-they friendship with an older woman, Emmaline Fox. Mrs Fox, a widow, works for the Rescue Society, an organisation that helps give former prostitutes proper jobs, and thereby knows Sugar and the circles she once operated in.

Mrs Fox's father is also a minor character. He's an arrogant and somewhat creepy doctor who tends to William's wife and pushes for her to be taken into a sanatorium, because how else do you treat a woman who is clearly suffering from a yet-to-be-diagnosed case of post-natal depression? 

William's two bachelor friends, Bodley and Ashwell (or Bashley and Oddwell, as William is want to call them in moments of extreme drunkenness), serve as foils to his conscience, often encouraging him to do outrageous things, and together they add a dollop of devilish humour to the story.

But despite the completely absorbing tale that I found The Crimson Petal and the White to be, it's not without its (tiny) faults. There's a rather annoying omnipresent narrator who can sometimes grate, although the following sentence did make me laugh out loud:

So there you have it: the thoughts (somewhat pruned of repetition) of William Rackham as he sits on his bench in St James's Park. If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.

The good thing is that this narrator does ease himself out of the story quite early on, and only makes his appearance known again at the very end, so it's tolerable if you don't really like that sort of thing. In any case, you shouldn't let it put you off reading this wonderful, boisterous and hugely entertaining novel. It sounds ludicrous to say it, but at 833 pages it almost seemed too short and the near-perfect ending came almost too soon for my liking.

'Losing You' by Nicci French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Books; 293 pages; 2007.

I'm a long-time Nicci French fan, but it's been more than two years since I picked up anything written by this husband-and-wife team. Once-upon-a-time I would anxiously await each new release, sometimes even buying them in hardcover when expenses would allow, because I enjoyed reading these psychological thrillers so much.

But I found the last French book, Catch Me When I Fall, slightly disappointing. It felt like the girl-on-the-run-from-a-stranger franchise had become tired and too formulaic, or perhaps I'd simply cottoned on to the fact that Nicci French is a one-trick pony and I wanted a little more from the reading experience. Needless to say, I didn't rush out and buy the next one: I bided my time and acquired it via BookMooch a month or so ago.

Losing You, I am happy to report, is a welcome breaking of the mould. This time it's not a young woman being stalked that forms the backbone of the narrative, but a mother searching for her missing child. It's a refreshing change.

The novel -- the 10th one in the French catalogue -- is set on Sandling Island, 60 miles from London, "but, rimmed as it was by the tidal estuary and facing out to open sea, it had the feel of a different world, gripped by weather and seasons; full of wild spaces, loneliness, the strange call of sea-birds and sighing winds". It's the ideal claustrophobic and slightly creepy setting for the story that enfolds over the course of the next 290 pages.

Nina Landry, recently separated from her husband, is about to embark on a Christmas break to Florida with her new beau and her two children, 15-year-old Charlie (Charlotte) and 11-year-old Jackson. The day ahead looms large, with a million tasks to do before the family heads to Heathrow for their 6pm flight, but things go off kilter before it even gets started. First, Nina's car breaks down, then her house is swamped by people throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for her -- and all this before 11am. 

It's only when Nina notices Charlie's absence that the suspense gets ratcheted up a notch or two. When she calls the police, they assume it's simply a case of a teenager running away because she's unhappy at home. But Nina knows this isn't true.

Embarking on her own investigation, she slowly pieces together Charlie's last movements and, in doing so, learns that the relationship she has with her daughter is not as open or as trusting as she first thought. Nina slowly begins to uncover secrets within secrets, all of which lead her to believe that Charlie will turn up dead if she doesn't find her quickly...

This is typical French fare in the sense that the suspense doesn't really let up from the word go, helped in part by absolutely no chapter breaks. The prose style hurries along at an ever-quickening pace without losing the rich detail and vivid descriptions that bring the narrative to life -- you get a real sense of the people, the places and the events that occur in ways that a less-busy, tell-don't-show style would fail to deliver.

There are plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and many characters are not what they first appear to be, and all the while the story never really escalates into all-out melodrama. Indeed, it reads as quite an authentic account of a panicked mother trying to find her missing child when the rest of the world doesn't seem to take her concerns seriously enough.

Losing You is a thoroughly entertaining read, one to quicken the pulse and test your powers of deduction all the way through. I can honestly say I did not guess the ending, nor the perpetrator, which is quite rare in much of my recent reading experience.

Now, that French seems to have worked her way into my good books once again, I wonder where I can get my hands on a copy of her latest novel Until It's Over...

'The Unknown Terrorist' by Richard Flanagan

Fiction - hardcover; Grove Press; 336 pages; 2007.

Australian author Richard Flanagan's latest novel, The Unknown Terrorist, is dedicated to David Hicks, the Australian-born Taleban fighter captured by US forces in Afghanistan in November 2001. Hicks was detained by the US Government in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp for more than five years, before he was tried and convicted of supporting terrorism in 2007. His ongoing detention without trial made him a cause célèbre in Australia.

If nothing else, this particular case highlights that those accused of terrorism are not subject to the normal "rules" under the justice system as it operates in most democratic countries: if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time you could be locked away without trial and, what's more, you could be mistreated and tortured on the simple basis that you are presumed guilty with no legal right to defend yourself.

Since the advent of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, we live in dangerous times, but who is in danger? Innocent civilians who may be blown up at any moment? Or innocent people accused of plotting to blow things up on the flimsiest of "evidence"? It's a blurry line and it is exactly this line that Flanagan exploits for the purposes of this thrilling, thoroughly modern novel.

Set in Sydney across five hot, summer days, the story follows Gina Davies, a lap dancer known as the Doll, on the run from the law having been accused of helping to plot a terrorist attack. But Gina is entirely innocent. Her "crime" has been no more than having a one-night stand with an attractive stranger, Tariq, who is blamed for three unexploded bombs found at Homebush Olympic Stadium the previous day.

Broadcast journalist come television celebrity Richard Cody -- whom I suspect is a thinly veiled version of Ray Martin -- is onto the story straight away for a prime time current affairs program called Undercurrent. Cody has had a secret "encounter" with the Doll at the club and thinks there's something mysterious about her. What ensues is a media beat-up about the "unknown terrorist" that becomes increasingly fantastic as time goes on, with little grounding in reality. But despite Cody's occasional twinges of guilt -- he realises the Doll has no motive for the crime -- he justifies his decision to "move the story on" because ASIO spook Siv Harmsen tells him that "we need stories that remind people of what horrifying things might happen".

And so standing together they watched the same footage run again -- the same bomb in the same kid's backpack; the same bad photograph of the same bearded man in Arabic-looking dress; the same slow-motion grainy images of Tariq and the Doll hugging each other. The repetitive images clicking over filled the TV like loose change filling an empty pokie.

The Twin Towers fell again; the same children's bodies were laid out once more in Beslan; the same man or woman dressed in black brandished the same machine gun; the Doll continued dancing naked. And there were new scenes -- a murky London tube train moments after it had been bombed; the Sari nightclub burning after the Bali bombing; wounded being taken away from the Madrid train bombing, the montage culminating in ashot that zoomed in on the Sydney Opera House before being blowing out to white, a cheap effect accompanied by an ominous rumble.

The Doll closed her eyes.

When she opened them she saw Osama bin Laden. George W. Bush. Missiles being launched. Men in robes firing grenade launchers. Great buildings exploding into balloons of fire. Women covered in blood. Hostages about to be beheaded. New York! Bali! Madrid! London! Baghdad! The Doll disintigrating into dancing squares of colour, herself pixellated, smiling a smile that was never hers.

Without wishing to spoil the plot, Gina's life -- and that of her best friend, Wilder -- is put in increasing danger until the dramatic, heart-thumping climax. This is a genuinely intelligent thriller, quite unlike anything Flanagan has written before but with the same beautifully written prose for which he is renowned. I love the ways in which he uses analogies and similes to bring his writing to life. The book is littered with hundreds of examples, but this one, in which he compares a policeman's dying marriage to that of a dying tree, demonstrates his particular brand of originality.

They stayed together and watched each other slowly become strangers, watched their love die as you watch a great old gum tree succumb to dieback. The affair was over for him, but it was just beginning for her. She never found out then, but it was as if each day now she lived another day of those years of lies and deceit; and his punishment was to witness her suffering. First just the leaf tips in the distant crown brown a little at the edges, then whole leaves, then a branch here and there. Still the tree lives, and everyone says it will be fine, that it is the weather, or one of those things, or anything but the death of something as natural and as seemingly permanent as a tree. But when his marriage began dying back, Nick Loukakis discovered nothing is fine.

Each day some small thing -- a joke, a shared intimacy, a sweet memory -- he found to have withered and died. Caresses fell like dead leaves. Conversations cracked and then broke. And in the end there was nothing to quicken the trunk with the rising sap that fed and was fed in return by the branches, by the twigs, by the leaves. And in the end what remained, Nick Loukakis discovered, was nothing; nothing to keep it going, just a large thing still standing erect and proud, only everything about it had withered and died.

This is a very knowing novel, carefully constructed to expose the kinds of puppetry that goes on behind the scary headlines and news bulletins that bombard us on a daily basis. As well as dropping cynical observations about media manipulation, The Unknown Terrorist also takes a pop at the politics of fear mongering. It's by no means a perfect novel -- there are far too many coincidences throughout, and the entire plot is far too contrived -- but it's a genuinely exciting and thought-provoking read about the shallow yet dark times in which we live.

'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' by Richard Flanagan

Fiction - paperback; Grove Press; 425 pages; 1997.

I seem to be on a roll with Australian books. This one, my third in a matter of weeks, is by Richard Flanagan, who first came to international prominence with Gould's Book of Fish, which I read several years ago and loved very much. The book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

Prior to this Flanagan had written two other novels: Death of a River Guide, in 1994,  and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in 1997. Like Gould's Book of Fish, both are set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, where the author resides.

At its most basic level The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the strained relationship between a father and daughter, but it is far more complicated than that, touching on a wide range of issues including poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and wartime atrocities, all set within the social and historical context of Australia's immigrant past.

This is a book that possesses a strangely heady mix of bleakness and despair, tempered by moments of clarity and joy. Initially I wrestled with the writing style, because Flanagan is prone to overly-long sentences that sometimes so twist and bend out of shape you feel like you're riding a rollercoaster:

In that long Autumn of 1959, when elsewhere the world was sensing change so big and hard in its coming that it was like the trembling of the earth announcing the arrival of a yet to be seen locomotive, in that month of April in the city of Hobart, nothing much looked like it could ever change around a town that had grown used to never being anything but the arse end of everything: mean, hard and dirty, where civic ambition meant buying up old colonial buildings and bulldozing them quick and covering the dust promptly with asphalt for cars most people were yet to own, where town pride meant tossing any unlucky derro found lying in the park into the can, and where a sense of community equated with calling anybody with skin darker than fair a boong bastard unless he worse snappy clothes in which case he was a filthy wog bastard -- in that month of April when the cold slowly began its winter's journey, spreading its way down over weeks from the mountain's steel-blue flanks, on an early Saturday morning, an FJ was wending its way through the scummy back streets of north Hobart to the home of Umberto Picotti.

And it can be hard to get a foothold on the essence of the story when the narrative is non-linear, shunting backwards and forwards in time, and told from two different perspectives.

But in many ways this is what makes The Sound of One Hand Clapping such a wonderfully rich and beguiling read. Hypnotic and unbearably sad in places, it's a very human tale about two people locked together by a shared past who struggle to rise above the pain of their circumstances.

The story begins in 1954 when Slovenian couple Bojan and Maria Buloh, both scarred by the horrors of the Second World War, immigrate to Australia. Bojan, along with hundreds of other European immigrants, finds work as a labourer on a construction project to build a massive hydroelectric dam in the rugged Tasmanian highlands. Here the weather is harsh and living conditions primitive. One stormy evening Maria packs her bags and leaves her husband and three-year-old daughter Sonja behind. She is never seen alive again.

What enfolds over the next 35 years is essentially the nub of this compelling novel. Bojan drowns his grief in drink and struggles to make a decent life for his daughter. Sonja, unbearably miserable, eventually flees to the mainland. It is only when she is about to become a mother herself that she decides to re-establish contact, returning to Tasmania to make amends with her now elderly father. Her life's story is then told in a series of flashbacks intercut with chapters from Bojan's point of view.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a book about new beginnings that shatters the myth of Australia as the "lucky country". It does not shy away from presenting white Australians as uncouth, uncultured and racist at a period in the country's history at which immigration was running at an all-time high. For that reason alone, it is a refreshing -- and challenging -- read.

This critically acclaimed novel won the 1998 Victorian Premier's Prize for Best Novel, the 1999 ABA Australian Book of the Year Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. It was made into a film directed by Richard Flanagan in 1998.

'A Redbird Christmas' by Fannie Flagg

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 207 pages; 2005.

As much as I hate the term "heart-warming" I can't help but use it to describe this delightfully charming tale set in rural Alabama.

Peppered with plenty of kooky characters -- four widows, a couple of bachelors, a crippled girl and a tame bird -- and a simple plot -- 52-year-old city man with only a few months to live moves to warmer climes and gains a second chance at life, while a young girl abandoned by her trailer-trash family falls in love with a red cardinal and is "adopted" by a local woman -- A Redbird Christmas is a gentle read that won't tax your brain matter.

Sure, it's a little on the sweet side -- the epilogue is particularly heavy-handed in the saccharine department -- but overall it's the perfect antidote for the busy yuletide season. Mind you, this novel isn't overly Christmassy, so would make an ideal light read for any time of year.

'Don't Look Back' by Karin Fossum

 
Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 252 pages; 2003. Translated from the Norwegian by Felicity David.

A sleepy Norwegian village is rocked by the discovery of a teenage girl's naked body lying on the edge of a local, secluded lake. Did she kill herself? Or was she the victim of a sexual attack?

But there's much more to this crime than meets the eye, as Inspector Sejer soon discovers. The victim, for instance, was an extremely popular girl in the neighbourhood, but she had recently become withdrawn and had quit her school's handball team despite being a top-notch player. She had also stopped her regular babysitting work. Her mother puts this change in behaviour down to puberty; her father thinks there's slightly more going on; Sjer wonders if she might have been raped.

There's little evidence of who committed the murder but several locals fall under suspicion including a disabled man, a teacher and the girl's boyfriend. Without giving away the ending, it's always the person you least expect, isn't it?

Ultimately, this is a fast-moving, well-paced crime thriller that had me guessing all the way through, which is rather rare for me: I normally guess the ending long before I reach the final page.

The prose is straightforward, clear and concise and the dialogue is realistic.

It has a convincing set of characters, especially Inspector Sejer, a widower still mourning the death of his wife, who is smart, tough and fatherly. I liked him enormously.

And the atmosphere -- both of the cloying community stunned by the crime, and the sense of dread that builds as the investigation progresses -- is pretty much perfect.

On the strength of this one book I've already added the remainder of Fossum's back catalogue to my wish list.

'The Widow's Children' by Paula Fox

 
Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 240 pages; 2003.

This is one of those rare books that is almost impossible to review without quoting the whole novel from cover to cover. Pretty much every clipped and stripped back sentence in The Widow's Children resonates with meaning and provides startling insights into the ways in which family members interact and play games with one another.

Originally published in 1976 and only recently back in print via Flamingo, The Widow's Children is peppered with eccentric characters, many of them wholly detestable, seething with anger and unspoken hostility.

The lead character, the fierce and somewhat bitchy Laura Maldonada Clapper, is about to embark on an African vacation with her slightly browbeaten husband Desmond. On the eve of their departure they throw a small party in their New York hotel room for a select group of people: Laura's unspecified male friend Peter, her gay brother Carlos and her daughter from a previous marriage, Clara. The party eventually moves onto a restaurant in Manhattan in which family members struggle to control their rage about things said or not said in the past.

The lynch-pin of the novel is the fact that Laura, one of those hard-nosed women of whom it is impossible to say no, is withholding information: earlier that day she was told that her mother, the matriarch of the family, had died. It is only when this information leaks out that the real family fireworks begin.

The Widow's Children is a short, easy-to-read novel (I devoured it in one sitting) but its brevity should not be mistaken for lack of depth. This is a fiercely intelligent read featuring brilliantly realistic characters. The dialogue is sharp, snappy and often witty, and despite the sometimes sombre subject matter the pathos is tempered by glimmers of unexpected humour. This is definitely a worthy follow-up to her much acclaimed Desperate Characters.

'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 176 pages; 1998.

First published in 1926, The Great Gatsby is known the world over as a 20th Century Classic and yet I had never read it... until now.

What can I say that hasn't already been said?

It's a wonderful romp through the 1920s jazz age, an era where people, having survived the horrors of the First World War, were prepared to have a good time, to let their hair down and experience life.

Here, on Long Island a mysterious man called Jay Gatsby throws glittering parties where friends and strangers alike congregate on the lawns of his extensive estate to enjoy themselves, to drink cocktails, swim in his pool and dance to the music of a fully fledged orchestra. They also like to debate Gatsby's origins, to gossip about his past and to spread the rumour that "he killed a man".

But Gatsby's neighbour, the shy but honest Nick Carraway, whom narrates the story, is the only one prepared to get to know him in an attempt to discover the truth and, in doing so, unexpectedly becomes his best friend along the way.

When Gatsby confesses his unrequited love for Nick's married cousin, Daisy Buchanan, a chain of events is set in motion that begins with a clandestine meeting between the pair. Eventually, when Daisy tells her husband that she is going to leave him for Gatsby, an unexpected tragedy unfolds that has repercussions for all involved...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It has a brilliant mix of laugh-out loud comedy, heady romance, intrigue and tragedy. The descriptions of the wild parties "where the lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun" are so wonderfully alive it almost feels like you are there.

Gatsby, with his immaculate suits and reassuring smiles, is intriguing and mysterious enough that you can understand the fascination about him. There's just a hint of melancholy sadness beneath the surface that makes you forgive his bombastic show of moneyed success, as if he was using his guests as much as they were using him, but it's not until the tragic ending that you fully grasp the shallow superficiality of his existence.

There's a lot going on here of which I am loathe to explore, simply because it's been done a hundred-fold before, so let me just say that The Great Gatsby is an entertaining, quick-paced read wholly worthy of its classic status.

[You can read my initial impressions of this book here.]

'Desperate Characters' by Paula Fox

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 176  pages; 2003.

First published in 1970, Desperate Characters has recently been "rediscovered" and much acclaimed by the literary elite (in the introduction to this edition, Jonathan Franzen says that when he first read the book in 1991 he "fell in love with it. It seemed to me obviously superior to any novel by Fox's contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow").

A relatively short and easy-to-read novel, it is overwhelmingly articulate - on so many levels: in its succinct, snappy dialogue; in its dissection of a marriage under strain between a comfortably middle-aged middle-class childless couple; in its analysis of friendships, also under strain, by social mores and expectations; in its exploration of a woman's role in society (should she work? should she have children?); and in its descriptions of the seedy underbelly of 1960s New York life, where drunks roam the Brooklyn streets and faceless people vandalise property.

On the face of it not much seems to happen in Desperate Characters. The main character, Sophie Bentwood, gets bitten by a cat, but from that one, small, unexpected act so much fear and loathing rises to the surface. Not wanting to cause a fuss, Sophie tries to hide the bite from her uptight husband, Otto, but then spends the rest of the book stressing that she may have caught rabies. It is Sophie's constant worrying, not just about the cat bite but the state of her husband's rocky partnership with a fellow lawyer and the resulting social fall-out, that provides the novel's momentum. Coupled with the fact that Sophie is plagued by memories of a past love affair with one of Otto's clients, the reader can't help but think that the Bentwoods are doomed, whichever way you look at it.

Despite the underlying tone of menace, this is a wonderfully realised examination of the human condition that does not resort to melodrama or cliche. A fine gem of a book - and well worth a second read.

'Catch Me When I Fall' by Nicci French

Fiction - hardcover; Penguin; 304 pages; 2005.

Holly Krauss is a bundle of energy. She's young, vibrant, creative, attractive - and always on the go. Married to the lovely Charlie, a stay-at-home artist, she runs a company of her own with her best friend and business partner Meg. But despite all her success, her whirlwind lifestyle begins to catch up with her. And when she goes on an all-night bender, the cracks begin to appear in her relationships and before she knows it her entire life is spiralling out of control.

As per usual, this is fairly typical French fare: a woman on the run from dangerous forces, unable to trust anyone around her, not even her husband. And while this formula has worked very successfully in all of French's previous novels (this is her seventh book), I found this one was a little too predictable. And some of the "thrills" slightly disappointing.

I also did not like the sudden change in narrator half-way through the book. This took some of the steam out of the engine, and it was difficult to adjust to the new "voice" and to find my bearings as a reader once again.

That aside, I still enjoyed this book. It was a quick read, and the build-up to Holly's breakdown was well written, intriguing and difficult to put down. And the story, as with every other French novel, had a satisfying, generally well-rounded conclusion.

You could do worse than read this interesting thriller, but if you haven't read anything by French before I would advise you try some of her earlier stuff: her back catalogue is filled with more gripping page-turning books than this one.

'Secret Smile' by Nicci French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 336 pages; 2004.

This is the sixth novel by the husband-and-wife-team who write under the pseudonym Nicci French. In many ways French is a one-trick pony: each book tells the same story - a woman on the run from a menacing force while her family and friends ignore her pleas for help - only the details change. But French has the knack of ensuring each story sounds fresh and new, and, more importantly, scary as hell. Secret Smile is no different.

In this creepy tale painter/decorator Miranda Cotton breaks up with her "almost" boyfriend, Brendan, after she finds him reading her personal diaries without asking. Just two weeks later Brendan becomes engaged to Miranda's sister, Kerry, after a shock whirlwind romance. This deeply unsettles Miranda, but family and friends misinterpret her disapproval as jealousy, something that Brendan capitalises on by telling people that he dumped Miranda, not the other way around.

Slowly Brendan ingratiates himself more and more into the Cotton family, going out of his way to drive a wedge between Miranda and Kerry.

When his behaviour turns threatening, Miranda finds it difficult to make anyone believe her side of the story. And as things progress from bad to worse, it's not only Miranda who finds her life put at risk.

This is a definite over-the-top story. But it's a great chilling psychological romp. And sometimes it's nice to let a book take you on an exciting journey without having to take anything too seriously. A good read if you're looking for something entertaining and just a little bit creepy.

I've read all of Nicci French's books but the only one reviewed on this site is Land of the Living.

'Towards the end of the Morning' by Michael Frayn

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 221 pages; 2000.

This book should come with a warning: don't read in public. Honestly, I have not read such a humorous book in a long time. It is laugh-out-loud funny.

It's set in London at an unspecified newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street. While it's a story about journalism and its struggle with changing work practises and the emerging "glitterati" of television broadcasting, it's essentially a comedy of manners.

At the heart of the story are two journalists - the older, more uptight and ambitious John Dyson, who is anxious to find an easy route out of his mundane job, and the younger, more laid back and directionless Bob Bell, who doesn't have the courage to dump his girlfriend. The two of them work in the crossword and nature notes department but spend most of their time in the local drinking establishments complaining about their jobs and their workloads.

Through their day to day struggles, Frayne is able to tackle some big themes - old school journalists coming to grips with an emerging tide of bright, young and worryingly efficient graduate trainees; newspaper journos trying to break into the much better paid field of broadcast journalism; the class system; how to get on the property ladder; and race relations - but he does it very deftly and with great humour.

Towards the end of the Morning was written in 1967, but it holds up well as a modern classic. And Frayn's use of dialogue is spot on. He captures the art of conversation very well, often with more than three or four people speaking at once, very tricky if you've ever tried to do it yourself. It is perhaps Frayn's ear for dialogue that has made him such a gifted and much-praised playwright (Copenhagen and Noises Off are two of his more well known ones, although he has written 11 others).

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It would appeal to anyone looking for a fast-paced funny read.