Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman

How does a lightly sweetened bildungsroman portray the experience of loss with conviction but without evoking the paralyzing misery of grief – which might ruin a story like Saving CeeCee Honeycutt? (After all, the title suggests CeeCee must be rescued, which can’t happen if she goes down a mental rabbit hole.) Fortunately, Beth Hoffman knows, and it’s all to the good for readers of her charming debut novel.

When 12-year-old CeeCee’s mother dies and her incapable father sets about dispatching her to the home of distant relatives in the southern United States, the girl is crushed – but in a scant few chapters, Hoffman shows us a child of uncommon steeliness, wise beyond her years but hungry for knowledge.

CeeCee has already endured her parents’ turbulent union and the gradual erosion of her mother’s sanity – not unrelated matters – and when she arrives at the home of her widowed great-aunt Tallulah ‘Tootie’ Caldwell in Savannah, Georgia, she observes more with curiosity than trepidation an iron fence resembling “countless yards of black lace” surrounding a house “the colour of lemonade.” There are no such romantic descriptions of the Ohio home CeeCee has left behind, and already she is half in love with her exotic new habitat.

Encounters only become more memorable from here, as CeeCee is introduced to new friends and neighbours: the disliked, “flap-jawed” town gossip, blowsy Violene Hobbs; glamorous, eclectic Thelma Rae Goodpepper, who bathes in an outdoor tub, keeps a peacock named Louis, espouses Buddhism, and plays Mozart, Puccini and Chopin to her plants; and Tootie’s faithful factotum Oletta.

CeeCee’s wit and intelligence echoes that of Flavia de Luce, the motherless young heroine of the Alan Bradley series, and, self-aware and humble, she is able to draw in the mother figures she needs. With such bonding comes real warmth and even the odd slapstick set-piece; few will fail to be amused by a scene involving catapulted slugs, gauzy nightwear and the literal downfall of ‘Miz Hobbs’.

But the South has a blood-soaked past, and tragedy is never far away. Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is pitched by the publisher as ‘perfect for fans of The Help’, Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller, and Hoffman is prone to didactic moments, in one instance juxtaposing the story of a slave ancestor with an ugly mugging during with the assailant spits out a notorious racial epithet. From this incident CeeCee learns that “in some ways things really hadn’t changed all that much for coloured folk.”

Closer to home, it is revealed that Oletta lost a daughter CeeCee’s age to meningitis, and another great-aunt, Lucille, succumbs to an aneurysm moments after entering the story.

There is no way to marry a light, coming-of-age-of-sorts tale with a real sense of place and time, and here, the malign bigotry afflicting the 1960s South is shown more as inconvenience than mortal threat. There is no chilling moment to equal the fate of a young black man who uses a whites-only bathroom in Stockett’s story.

Nevertheless, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt is so essentially good-hearted that one is inclined to forgive any flaws. Composed with skill, a sincere appreciation of character and an utter lack of cynicism, it leaves the spirits lifted.

3 / 5 stars: A sweet and deceptively sharp bildungsroman.

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Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” goes the famous line from Anna Karenina, and the Faircloughs, the fractured Cumbrian clan of Elizabeth George’s superb new crime novel Believing the Lie, energetically illustrate Tolstoy’s adage. Secrets and lies make for quality British drama, beginning here with the sudden death of Ian Cresswell, the nephew of industrialist and patriarch Bernard Fairclough, a productive member of the family firm, and, as a child, a resident of the Fairclough home.

Though Bernard and Valerie Fairclough have a legitimate heir to show for their long marriage, Nicholas is a dissolute recovering addict who long ago fell out of favour with his parents and sisters. Though now sober and married, most doubt the security of Nicholas’ abstinence, and some are likewise skeptical of the disability of his sister Mignon, a manipulator of the highest order who relies on her father’s largesse. This leaves a third sibling, Manette, to carry the flag, but she is distracted by regret over the recent dumping of her amiable husband Freddie, who is easily the most normal in the bunch.

Other featured players in a cast of rare richness include Ian’s lover Kaveh, for whom the dead man abandoned his marriage and with it the pretence of heterosexuality; Niamh, the wronged wife acidic with rage and bitterness; Ian and Niamh’s tormented teenage son, Tim; and Deborah and Simon St James, close friends of protagonist DI Thomas Lynley with troubles of their own.

Though an inquest declares Ian’s death accidental, Bernard asks Lynley, sagacious hero of 16 previous George novels, to travel from his London home to conduct a confidential review of the matter. Lynley isn’t alone in kicking over the traces; accompanying him, and soon espying a possible personal sensitivity in common with Nicholas’ wife Alatea, Deborah unwittingly lights the spark that will lead to an explosive conclusion. Meanwhile, a green tabloid reporter is dispatched by his editor to sniff out a tale of money and murder. Whether either are there to be found is just one of the novel’s sombre delights.

In its narrative intricacy and refusal to hew to tired crime fiction conventions, Believing the Lie bears comparison to Val McDermid’s 1999 peerless A Place of Execution. Though George’s work does not address an historical crime, both stories centre on investigators who journey to pastoral idylls to poke doggedly at family and community secrets. And like McDermid’s story, Believing the Lie elevates the genre and its possibilities: the writers delight in the intelligence of their readers and recognize that the ‘whodunit’ can be less compelling than what’s going on besides.

The story skips along at a pace belying its 560 pages. It marries the velocity of a Jilly Cooper novel – truly! – with the gravity of P D James. If this is the standard of 2012’s crop of crime writing, George has set a dauntingly high bar for all-comers. Believing the Lie may be the masterwork of an assured and inspired craftswoman, and it deserves every plaudit it will receive.

4 / 5 stars: A masterful crime thriller; possibly George’s finest work yet.

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No One Left to Tell by Karen Rose

In taking a workmanlike approach to her 13th thriller, No One Left to Tell, Karen Rose opts for the tried-and-true wrongful imprisonment theme and produces something akin to a Mills & Boon / James Patterson mash-up. The best and most plausible element of the book, which clocks in at an unwarranted 530 pages, is the spine of the storyline, the reasons for the conviction and imprisonment of one Ramon Munoz for a murder in a bar more than five years earlier.

In the opening pages Ramon’s wife Elena, determined to clear his name, hands exculpatory evidence to private investigator Paige Holden. Moments later, Elena is shot dead, and Paige, now joined by assistant state’s attorney Grayson Smith, who led the Munoz prosecution, recognizes a conspiracy to which all supporting parties are vulnerable to summary execution.

Wisely, Rose eschews red herrings when it comes to the hook of her plot – the guilt or innocence of Ramon Munoz – and makes clear to investigator and reader alike that the man was framed. The central perplexity, then, is the identity of the faceless puppet-master. Who set up Munoz, and who is now offing, with clinical ease, all who knew the truth? And, as Paige might think to herself in one of the reflective inner musings of which Rose is tediously fond, ‘For the love of God, why?’

When it emerges that the murdered woman was acquainted with the grandson of a retired United States senator, Paige and Smith begin to suspect that the scheme goes, as they say, all the way to the top. However, the pair’s progress isn’t made with quite the speed that either we or Munoz might hope for, owing to interminable episodes of flirtation and ascetic mutual self-denial on the part of the investigators.

Though both exposition and prose are plodding, the breathless tone and pacing owes a debt to Dan Brown’s kinetic style. Perhaps it’s coincidental, but I’d like to think that the name of No One Left to Tell’s obedient hitman, Silas, is a nod to the self-flagellating antagonist of The Da Vinci Code.

Rose maintains the tension at simmering point through the periodic staging of violent events, each of which prompts seemingly endless pages of debate among the investigators. At first stirring, this technique becomes tiresome and distracting – particularly when Rose wastes dramatic gunpowder on, for instance, the attempted murder of Paige early in the novel.

I thought I had the whodunit solved halfway through, but missed the mark completely. With primary plot being Rose’s strong suit, No One Left to Tell should be a firecracker – but the heavy-handed writing makes for a damp squib. Readers seeking masterful suspense or true, stomach-churning thriller noir would be better off turning to Ian Rankin or Mo Hayder. Those content with consistent daffiness punctuated by sporadic madcap foolishness will be satisfied by this endeavour.

1/5 stars: Turgid and overlong.

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For a Fee of Two Shillings by Faye Whittaker

It was her role as a court clerk after leaving school that lit the spark of what became Faye Whittaker’s debut novel, For a Fee of Two Shillings. There she met a “tubby, amiable man”, a lawyer who curated the courthouse library and encouraged the young clerk to study the law herself. That early mentor remained a fixture in her memory, and reappears in the fictional form of Thomas Gregory, a sagacious small-town attorney who deftly turns around the lives of a vulnerable young girl and those in her orbit within a tiny coastal Taranaki community.

Emma Hammond, whose steely sweetness is so affecting that one hopes Whittaker has more stories to tell of her, is a teenager who has endured the death of her Maori mother, Miri, and the explosive, violent unpredictability of her Pakeha father. Little is known about Joe Hammond, who bears an accent that hints at American origins. The community views him as an oddball, and with the birth of Emma his behaviour becomes extreme. Obsessively protective and clearly not all there, he segregates the family, raising Emma separately from her mother and two elder brothers.

To give away anything further about the plot would deny the reader a rewarding experience, and the author her due, so we shall turn to the characterization, one of the strongest elements of a well-conceived but sometimes flawed book.

People and the relationships they form are what Whittaker depicts most nimbly. Emma draws people in: first her father, then, as the family dissolves, her older brother Hemi (this bond is especially well-drawn), and finally Thomas Gregory, to whom she presents her sole possession, two shillings, in a humble bid for aid.

The insubstantial nature of Joe and Miri’s union is contrasted with her deep ties to her home marae and its people, who are rightly alarmed by the marriage but unable to prevent it. And Miri’s own angst, shared fully only with the reader, is genuinely saddening. Levity comes in the form of Gregory’s polite interactions with his longtime secretary, Miss Crisp, in scenes which possess an appealing authenticity.

Whittaker’s writing does let her down: there are distracting idiosyncrasies, such as conflations of nouns and verbs. One character “hollow-sighed”, another “seal-waved”, a particular sensation is a “swoon-float”. Sometimes words are misused – a hut shown to be Spartan in design and furnishings is then described as “certainly [not] the most ascetic of woodland cottages.”

The exposition at times verges on heavy-handed, most notably when a reverend’s expression of regret over his failure to recognize Miri’s cultural insecurity veers into verbal self-flagellation. And for some readers, suspension of disbelief may be required: a tohunga (shaman or high priest) and other elements of Maori and Christian spirituality are integral to the story.

But to harp on flaws is churlish, and worse, is to disregard the many triumphs of For a Fee of Two Shillings. It is difficult to write about cross-cultural relations and intermarriage, and such events as a British lawyer stepping on to a marae for the first time, with delicacy and an absence of condescension (either to reader or subject), but Whittaker does it.

2.5/5 stars: A competent debut from this Kiwi writer.

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The Thread by Victoria Hislop

The most shocking thing I, a grateful beneficiary of New Zealand’s social progressiveness, learned from The Thread was that it was not until 1952 that women in Greece were given the vote. Political commentary is not the purpose of Victoria Hislop’s impressive third novel, but this datum gives a taste of the delights that may be found within its pages, which relate the events befalling residents of Thessaloniki between 1917 and the early 1960s.

Though Greek’s second-largest city, I would venture that little about Thessaloniki is widely known beyond Europe. At the time of the first world war, it was a place of remarkable and peaceful diversity, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived harmoniously side-by-side.

But things fell apart, beginning with tension between Turkey and Greece that devolved into war and a massive population exchange. Soon after came the rise of Nazi-driven anti-Semitism and the departure of many Jews from Thessaloniki, then the second world war and the round-up and exportation to Poland of those who remained.

Hislop’s story, fortunately, is not conveyed in quite such archly factual terms: she hews to the conventions of historical fiction by blending the lives of her front-of-stage characters, Katerina and Dimitri and their families, evenly against the backdrop of serious strife. It is much harder than it looks to knit small lives into history in a way that is plausible and affecting but free of melodrama, and she does so much more ably than many others.

The Thread opens with a prologue featuring Mitsos, the grandson of Dimitri and Katerina, who meet as children in a melting-pot neighbourhood of Thessaloniki. Katerina has fetched up there with Eugenia, a Pontic Greek who fled from Turkish nationalists and scooped up the little girl, lost to her mother in a crush of refugees, on her way. Dimitri is well-to-do, the son of distant, work-obsessed industrialist Konstantinos and loving Olga, driven to agoraphobia by her husband’s emotional cruelty. We know the two survive the upheavals of their youth and middle age, so Hislop foments suspense by packing her tale with suffering and strife on scales small and large.

First Leonidas, Konstantinos’ brother, and later Dimitri fight in defence of their country – the latter on the side of the Communists, a shooting offence at the time and the cause of estrangement between father and son. Elsewhere, Dimitri is caught up in a notorious police action against protestors that left 12 dead and triggered a dictatorship, while behind closed doors and in response to the German threat, a sewing circle gathers to disguise and preserve the parochet, a Torah fragment thousands of years old.

Unspeakable loss is endured, and among many shattering instances is when we see how knowledge we now take for granted was first conveyed to a stunned populace, as a gendarme in a café relates the monstrous infrastructure of the Final Solution to a horrified, disbelieving young Jew.

To speak so much of conflict is not to call The Thread depressing: rather, in the final judgement it is a novel to restore faith, familiar in the characters’ love of an often besieged city (we all know the feeling of ‘no place like home’) and gently sentimental in its portrayal of the unbreakable bonds of love and family.

3 / 5 stars: A vivid and evocative portrait of a city upended.

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The Bomber by Liza Marklund

Some of her compatriots prefer roaming through vast tracts of anonymous countryside, with barns, shacks and empty garages serving their nefarious ends; others enjoy the dynamism of high-speed highways, airports and international travel; still others favour exposing the secrets and lies of life in suburbia.

In her latest Annika Bengtzon thriller, The Bomber, Liza Marklund sticks fast to her favourite urban zone, the Swedish capital, where Annika lives with her husband Thomas and their two young children and works – every hour that God sends, seemingly – as a top crime reporter for a leading daily newspaper.

Though it was written around the same time as Red Wolf, released here in 2010 but published in original Swedish seven years earlier, The Bomber is a better read – the writing is sharper and Marklund’s instincts for character development more honed.

Its premise is almost dangerously uncomplicated, as Scandinavian thrillers go. (It bears noting that for her pains, Marklund is in the unenviable position of having to compete in this thriving subgenre with some of the finest practitioners around, including Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell and the late Steig Larsson, whose fourth novel may yet be released.)

The Bomber opens action-movie style, with the murder of a woman and Annika leaping out of bed in immediate pursuit of both victim’s and killer’s identities. That Annika and not the police will find the bomber is never much in question. The deceased turns out to be Christina Furhage, the head of the Olympic Games soon to be held in Sweden, and her end came via explosive device inside Victoria Stadium, one of the prime Olympic venues.

Christina had received death threats and was under the highest level of protection – but, as the police disclose to Annika (suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite whenever a Marklund cop wanders into the scene), all alarms at the stadium had been deactivated. Moreover, Christina had no obvious reason to be there in the middle of the night. Annika’s investigation will of course reveal that there was little clear about the Olympic chief, and that following the trail of debris through her mysterious past will lead to her killer.

The presence of a villain offers invigorating possibilities to a storyteller, but when the titular character inevitably is revealed, Marklund spends little time exploring the motives of the bomber, who isn’t nearly as interesting as the protagonist. Indeed, by the climactic point, Marklund – and the reader – have been overtaken by affectionate irritation with Annika, whose workaholism once again threatens the stability of her personal life, but who, as ever, grittily yanks her marriage back from the abyss. And as fictional analyses of unions go, it’s pretty even-handed.

Though it’s unusually straightforward for a crime thriller, The Bomber is no less powerful for it. And it’s satisfying in large part for the evident fondness Marklund feels for her longtime heroine. The author, herself a former reporter, subjects Annika to the brutal unpleasantness of newsroom politics and takes evident satisfaction in her woman’s refusal to be cowed. She knows she’ll always come out on top.

2.5 / 5 stars: Scintillating sabotage, Swedish-style.

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Treasury by Maeve Binchy

After the underwhelming experience that was Irish writer Maeve Binchy’s most recent new work, 2010’s Minding Frankie, I approached her latest, Treasury, with trepidation.

However, it’s not really fresh writing, but a compilation of 43 short stories, 38 of which have previously been published (in The Return Journey and This Year It Will Be Different). And the nearly 550 pages add up to diverting, at times delightful, escapism.

A preponderance of the first half of Treasury’s stories are Christmas-themed, reflective of the seasonal nature of its issuance, and its fair to say repetitiveness is the book’s greatest weakness: Binchy has a few tried-and-tested plotlines and tends to variations on the same theme. ‘Gerald and Rose’ records a brief encounter between strangers who pay the price for their mistaken assumptions about one another, while ‘The Christmas Barramundi’, a more cynical version of the same tale, though one of much greater pathos, features a young teacher who segues from intense happiness to heartbreak in a handful of carefully wrought pages.

But it’s a very small failing. Many of the Christmas stories are excellent, and the best of the others may be the opening tale, ‘Golden Willow’, a suspenseful piece about a weekend in the life of an ostensibly privileged wife and mother. Her innermost thoughts are tracked as she comes abruptly and vocally to terms with her dissatisfaction with her life, and with the behaviour of her distant, status-obsessed husband.

This kind of woman – one who starts out meek and discovers her inner lioness – is presented also in ‘A Civilized Christmas’ and ‘This Year It Will Be Different’, and such rapid evolution might be considered a flaw. Binchy is also prone to resolutions too pat, too uncomplicated to properly reflect the messiness of life – but there is something immensely satisfying about her female characters’ propensity to wash their hands of problems, of unsuitable circumstances/men/relatives, and plough on unfettered. In the weight of a single volume, it becomes self-helpish, as if the writer is saying, over and over again, with different players, “Well, here is a recipe for living.”

Binchy writes for women, and places them front and centre. Many stories have a bittersweet tone, such as ‘The Apprenticeship’, which follows an accomplished young woman as she attends the wedding of her childhood best friend, who has bestowed on herself a new name and invented past in order to fit in with her aristocratic new in-laws.

In others Binchy shows off her knack for fomenting splendid comic tension, most ably in ‘Excitement’ when an embryonic affair devolves into a scene of near-slapstick involving a hateful mother and her purse-lipped acquaintance.

And there are some stock characters, with ‘Season of Fuss’ and ‘A Hundred Milligrams’ among the most notable stories to star curmudgeonly elders against whose misanthropic assaults other, good-hearted sorts battle to maintain the true spirit of Christmas.

But in the end – similar to the adage that people remember less what you say than how you make them feel – Binchy’s storylines are secondary to the moods her tales provoke. Her Treasury may leave you melancholy, quizzical, nostalgic or teary-eyed, but it won’t leave you unmoved.

2.5 / 5 stars: Many happy returns of the season.

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The German Boy by Patricia Wastvedt

It is in 1947 London that Patricia Wastvedt opens her latest novel, The German Boy, with Stefan Landau, “this white-skinned, bruise-eyed German”, landing in Dover and journeying to London to be met by his aunt, Elisabeth, the sister of Stefan’s English mother, Karen.

Elisabeth is apprehensive at the arrival of this near-stranger, and for good reason – 16-year-old Stefan, enigmatic, taciturn and only recently freed from the Hitler Youth’s death grip, can barely hide his disdain for his English relatives, the only family he still has. In this, he is very much his father’s son, and the story of what became of his Fuhrer-loving parents in Nazi Germany is just one of the narrative pearls Wastvedt plants for her reader to prise out as they make their way through this rich, absorbing novel.

Stefan remains oblivious to the (perhaps typical) messiness of his family’s evolution since the end of the First World War, but the more fortunate reader has the pleasure of returning, from this opening, to 1927. Here is introduced the novel’s pivotal character, a young artist named Michael Ross, who will become both subject and cause of sisterly obsession and the estrangement of Karen and Elisabeth.

Michael’s family is damaged in a way not unusual for the time: his father Albert was severely disabled in a 1917 mustard attack in France and is cared for by Michael’s mother Vera. Michael’s Jewish ancestry, though it’s of no consequence to the Rosses or their acquaintances, will become a matter of great import later in the story, when Karen (whom, he met, along with Elisabeth, through his sister Rachel in their school years) introduces him to her thoroughly propagandized German husband.

The beastly Artur Landau is a well-drawn, grim echo of the many willing servants of the Third Reich. Karen is in love with him and is thrilled to give birth to their son, but their marriage is one of convenience (not least because, by this reviewer’s reading, Awful Artur doesn’t bat for Karen’s team). As menacing as the Fuhrer himself, Artur’s actions catalyze much of the fast-moving second half of the story, which leaps from the early 1930s and the establishment of Nazi Germany to 1947, following the divergence of Karen and Elisabeth’s familial paths. These passages, crafted with imagination and empathy, make The German Boy an historical novel that is a cut above the rest.

Wastvedt demonstrates a remarkable knack for evoking the many small kindnesses and unexpected fellowships that bolstered the bruised survivors of two unholy wars. One character, striking up a conversation with a night porter at a train station one chilly evening, ends up giving the virtual stranger 20 acres of land he owns in the Romney Marsh.

Years later that kind man becomes Elisabeth’s husband, and we can see that event owes more to her recognition of her need for his goodness than to romantic love. But this is Wastvedt’s point – there is no horror in the mundanity of the everyday, when you have seen the alternatives.

3.5 / 5 stars: A family’s story, told with delicacy and daring.

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Summer of Love by Katie Fforde

The slipping-into-a-warm-bath experience proffered by Katie Fforde has stood the Gloucestershire writer in very good stead over the course of what, with Summer of Love, is now a 17-novel catalogue.

The lightness and gentle humour of her writing apparently reflect authorial traits: the jacket bio (always revelatory as to how seriously a writer takes herself) reveals that recently, Fforde’s “old hobbies of ironing and housework have given way to singing, flamenco dancing and husky racing. She claims this keeps her fit.” Similarly, there are traces of self-deprecation in some of her characters.

In Summer of Love, Sian Bishop is a single mother who arrives with four-year-old son Rory in a small town in the countryside not far from London. Rory was the result of the briefest of affairs, and has never met his father, who doesn’t know of his existence. Although Sian could track him down, they agreed when he departed for a long stint overseas that it was best to cut all ties, and Sian – whose rare brand of insecure doggedness becomes extremely grating as the story develops – has been true to their accord, raising Rory with the help of her parents.

It is when the pair decamp from London in search of a civilized school that the tale commences and Fforde’s lively, vibrant cast of characters begins to troop in to Sian’s rented cottage. All boxes are ticked: mid-50s Fiona is sage, fearless and seeking love on the internet; prickly, poised Melissa wants to buy the cottage out from under Sian and Rory, and periodically pops in to ponder her future renovation of the “damp, poky” kitchen; James the bookseller is a dark horse with sound romantic potential; and then there’s Gus, Fiona’s son, who hoves cursingly into view in the midst of a dinner party . . .

To say much more would be to give away a game which gets suspenseful (in a soft, relaxing sort of way) about a third of the way in. The quiet, orderly life Sian has created for herself and her son is wrenched wide open, and skeletons emerge, but no one gets hurt and there are plenty of breaks for tea and scones.

Fforde’s books are very much for women, and loathe as I am to use the term ‘chick-lit’, with writers such as the tremendous Jennifer Weiner having disparaged it, I don’t know of a more apt descriptor for her ability to spin amusing yarns that tie up neatly at the end. Her characters have all the flaws, foibles and blind spots of people you know, but the tidy conclusions bear little resemblance to real life, which is where her books find their appeal.

Summer of Love doesn’t push any boundaries, and readers will struggle even to register the existence of some characters; Rory, for instance, is merely a cipher, existing only to serve a larger purpose in the plot. It is neither intellectually challenging nor very memorable, but will provide comfort and distraction to those of a certain bent. Much like a warm bath.

2.5 / 5 stars: Ideal for a winter escape.

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Hanging Hill by Mo Hayder

Disclaimer: I adore Mo Hayder’s writing – her twisty but never implausible plotting, her gimlet-eyed view of her jaundiced casts – and can’t claim to approach her work with a lack of bias. She is particularly noted for grisly frankness, which even by crime thriller standards is unusually confronting (her second novel, 2001’s The Treatment, had themes of paedophilia and other child abuse), and perhaps it is this, combined with the lack of self-conscious or artifice in her writing or characters, which makes her so compelling.

Unlike 2010’s Gone, part of her Walking Man series featuring several recurring characters, her new work Hanging Hill is a stand-alone novel which centres on the murder of a pretty young high-schooler in the historic English city of Bath. The girl’s body is found shortly after her failure to return from a daytime shopping trip. She is discovered with a tennis ball wedged into her mouth; two messages are scrawled on her bare torso in bright lipstick. The motive for the killing is unclear.

While this crime drives the plot, the real story, set up in a cryptic prologue involving a conversation at a funeral, is about two adult sisters, Zoe and Sally. As the tale unfolds, it emerges that Zoe and Sally have been estranged since childhood, following an event so traumatic that the girls’ parents determined it would be best to separate them forever, starting with different boarding schools.

The separation stuck, though the two remain in Bath, averting their eyes when they see each other in the street and keeping abreast of each others’ lives through the chance comments of mutual acquaintances. Zoe knows of Sally’s recent divorce – though not that its cause was her husband’s affair with their blowsy Australian au pair, with whom he now has a new baby – and Sally tracks Zoe’s career with the Bath police.

Both women bear heavy emotional and practical burdens. Zoe copes with the pressures of her job and a tentative affair with a colleague by self-harming, while Sally’s lack of financial acumen has her hovering just above penury. Both women are led by their choices and circumstances towards one another and, more precipitously, in the direction of Bath’s dark underbelly and some miscreants who have fetched up there (including a delightfully repellent big-time pornographer who inadvertently becomes a vivid fulcrum of the narrative).

The investigation of the initial murder is what first snares the sisters and may bring them freedom. Zoe is part of the investigating team, and the dead girl was an acquaintance of Sally’s daughter Millie. The two teenagers had several friends in common, some of whom become suspects (in the loosest sense of the term – there is a dearth of vim and vigour in Hayder’s version of the Bath constabulary) thanks to some criminal profiling that is more convenient than accurate.

Hayder has a particular knack for character creation, and for even-handedness, drawing out the good as she does the bad. It is all too easy in crime writing to set up a couple of red-herring, paint-by-numbers villains, while artfully concealing the diabolical sociopathy of that nice, nondescript chap who’s been under the reader’s nose the whole time.

This writer never does so, instead constructing her story so craftily, with such sleight of hand, that the mysteries of the chapters seem to unfold for her just as they do her reader. She is indisputably one of the greats.

4 / 5 stars: Menacing and masterful.

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