S. J. Bolton - Dead Scared

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good thriller - in the end

I enjoyed this book, the first of S.J. Bolton's I have read. It has a decent plot, some engaging and reasonably believable characters and in the end it had me thoroughly gripped. The plot, which was pretty fresh and original, revolves around an undercover officer posing as a student in Cambridge in order to investigate a spate of suspicious-looking suicides. S.J. Bolton managed to produce quite a few of the clichés of the genre - officer in peril, not knowing whom she can trust, eventually taken off the case and so on - but handled them well enough for them not to grate. She introduces a character fairly early on who seemed to stand out a mile as the villain, but she is truly ingenious in playing with expectations and I genuinely didn't know whether he was a baddie or not until the dénouement.

I did have some reservations. I think the book is too long and by the time I'd read the first half I was thinking I'd be writing a fairly critical review. I found the very short chapters and the fast cutting between points of view very distracting and irritating - particularly between the first person narrative of the main protagonist and various different third person narratives. The pace seemed slow, the prose was a bit pedestrian and the crackling sexual tension between the two police officers didn't crackle and wasn't particularly sexy or tense. Having set the book in Cambridge, I thought Bolton failed to generate much sense of place, and there is a wholly unnecessary prologue which aced more as a major spoiler than as an appetite-whetter.

However, around page 200 the book seemed to hit its stride and the prose became tighter, the plot picked up pace and became genuinely creepy, and Cambridge suddenly came alive (one scene with Evensong in St John's Chapel in the background was particularly good) so that I ended up thoroughly engrossed and finished the book in preference to watching a TV programme I'd planned to see. The ending was slightly disappointing - not entirely convincing in its resolutions and schmaltzy enough to have been created by Richard Curtis in a particularly sentimental mood - but I didn't really mind by that point.

Although you may have to do a bit of wading through the first half of the book, I can recommend this as a very decent thriller in the end and well worth the effort.