Rating: 4/5
Review:
Enjoyable and gripping
I enjoyed this book. It is a well-written, interesting story, and even though the elements of it may seem to have become tired clichés - a missing child, an independent-minded psychologist becoming personally involved, a grumpy detective and so on - it still remained fresh-seeming and original and it had me completely hooked and reading far too late by the last 150 pages or so.
The opening, a sort of 20-page prologue from 1987, was excellent but I have to say that I found the first hundred pages or so of the main narrative pretty hard going. Frieda Klein, the psychologist, is clearly being set up for a series so there was a great deal of character-establishing stuff which I thought made the opening of the book drag very badly, but once things got going and her life formed a background to the story rather than the other way round it was very good. Some suspension of disbelief is required as people do rather ridiculous things or have implausible insights for the sake of the plot - but then that's almost always the case in such tales, and the story was certainly believable enough to be very enjoyable. The pacing is excellent as the tension climbs, and the easy-flowing, literate prose was a pleasure to read.
This is the first Nicci French I have read (a careless omission on my part) and I was impressed. Once you have waded through the opening it's a very good, exciting psychological thriller. Warmly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment