Set near Nice, a long, rather disjointed set-up gives us Hannah enrolling as a maid for a shabby company servicing expensive holiday villas for the rich a job for which she is plainly too well educated and too mature. A middle-aged man sends Summer, his teenage mistress, to stay there for a week until he arrives to see her for a while before his wife and son join him. Hannah befriends Summer, and we learn something of their histories and characters but there are sinister developments leading to a mystery.
If this seems a very vague outline, it’s because it takes about a quarter of the book to get to this point and to say any more would therefore be a spoiler for a significant portion of the book – although for some while it’s fairly plain what will happen next. Frankly, I found it all rather plodding and Fowler’s development of suspense is so laboured, with pages and pages of things maybe moving in the bushes, noises that were probably just an animal and so on, that I began to feel patronised and to get rather annoyed.
I didn’t think things improved much as the book developed. It all felt rather standard, run-of-the-mill Tense Psychological Thriller stuff and I wasn’t really engaged. The problem is that without the brilliant elements of character and history which make Bryant & May so good, this just felt very ordinary to me.
I’m genuinely sorry to be so critical of an author whose other work I love, but this wasn’t for me. The psychological thriller isn’t a genre I generally like and I only tried this because it’s Fowler. Fans of the genre may like it much more, but personally I can’t recommend it.
(My thanks to Titan Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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