Pieces of Her, by Karin Slaughter – and the sequel,

Girl Forgotten.

 

            It’s obviously best to read Book One first (Duh!), where we meet Andrea Oliver, a 31-year-old college drop-out who is finding it hard to get out of bed, let alone get her life into some kind of order, even though she has an enormously supportive mother who lives and works in a lovely Delaware seaside community as a speech therapist:  Andrea lives above her mum’s garage in a very small apartment – and wishes she didn’t, but can’t summon the will and determination to organise herself away from there and Mum’s loving but smothering apron strings.

            Until a coffee morning at the local Mall turns into a bloodbath, with her life being threatened by a disturbed (I’ll say!) eighteen-year-old with a gun:  two people die in the carnage, but her mother, in an act of impossible bravery, saves her – by knifing the shooter.  It transpires that in the subsequent investigation, Andrea’s mum is the complete opposite to the façade she has always presented to the world, in fact she is in a witness-protection program instituted by the US Marshal Service, part of a plea-deal she made with authorities to incarcerate a band of would-be domestic terrorists many years ago. All were intent on blowing up various parts of down-town New York to protest at the corrupt capitalist world-order.

            Needless to say, Andrea is in shock, and finally gets enough gumption to start investigating the past.  What she discovers will change her life forever.

 

            ‘Girl Forgotten’ starts in a flash-back to the Eighties in the same seaside town that was Andrea’s home:  Emily Vaughn, a hugely pregnant high-school student, is determined to attend the school Prom, regardless of her rich and powerful parents’ orders not to.  She wants to confront her former friends who have all blanked her since she found that she was pregnant, the friends who were known as The Clique, envied, admired, intellectually and culturally superior – they were all going to make such an impact!  Until Emily appeared and embarrassed them, especially their charismatic ‘leader’ Clayton Morrow:  he expected to go farther than anyone – for God’s sake, get her out of here. 

            Emily’s naked body is eventually found in a dumpster.  The murderer is never found, and The Clique disbands, all going their separate ways, until Andrea Oliver, newly graduated as a US Marshal, is sent to the town to protect the late Emily Vaughn’s mother, a prominent Supreme Court Justice, from recent death threats.  Yes, Andrea has finally gotten herself together;  she has discovered some terrifying secrets about her origins, but they have energised and given her focus at last, and Emily’s cold-case is just one of several mysteries she wants to solve.

            This is the first time I have read anything by Ms Slaughter, and I greatly admire her ability to keep the many and complicated threads of her plot powering along at a mighty rate.  The suspense almost never flags, except for a time just before the end of ‘Girl Forgotten’, but that’s a small quibble when viewed overall.  She is an immensely enjoyable and entertaining writer and deserves her best-seller status.  FIVE STARS EACH.    

 

These Days, by Lucy Caldwell.

 

  

          April, 1941:  Doctor Philip Bell and his wife Florence live with their three children in a leafy suburb of Belfast.  As one would expect they are prosperous, able to have a housekeeper and a cleaning girl for several days of the week and all should be hunky-dory;   eldest daughter Audrey is in a deepening relationship with Richard, a young hospital Doctor; middle daughter Emma is a night-shift volunteer at the local First-Aid Post, and youngest child Paul, at thirteen, is dying to be seventeen so that he can enlist in the Air Force and blast those Germans out of the skies!  So.  Even though there is a World War taking place on their doorstep, they are all managing, so they are.

            Until German pilots drop incendiary bombs on the docks and industrial parts of Belfast to disable Britain’s war effort.  Belfast suddenly has its very own Blitz and the entire city reels in shock:  at the First Aid Post, wardens are bringing in people who should be in the hospitals, and the hospitals are dealing with corpses.  Belfast is not managing any more.

And neither is the Bell family:  Audrey has accepted Richard’s marriage proposal, partly because Richard was so distraught at the thought of losing her to the bombing (his declarations of love were irresistible!), but marriage means giving up a job in the Tax Office that she really likes – married women don’t ‘work’ after marriage – and the friends and workmates that she enjoys seeing.

Emma is still on the night-shift at the First-Aid Post which suits her admirably, for she has begun a passionate love-affair with her Supervisor, Sylvia.  She has never known such heady, ardent emotions and is prepared to devote the rest of her young life to Sylvia, and damn the consequences!  She can’t imagine what her prim and proper mother Florence would think if she knew – but Florence has secrets and longings of her own, memories of another war, and another love.           

Ms Caldwell moves her various characters expertly through their reactions to the first bombing and the second fire-storm;  she is a superb storyteller and from her thorough historical research recreates a searing, tragic  account of a terrible chapter in Belfast’s history, where the only certainty is that one’s life will never be the same.  No-one is immune to tragedy and woe:  it’s how they react to it that determines their lives.  ‘Belfast is finished’, said so many:  how wrong they were!  SIX STARS.   

             

 

The Last to Disappear, by Jo Spain.

 

 

         The last woman to disappear in Jo Spain’s taut thriller is a temporary Hotel tourist guide in the winter wonderland of Lapland in Northern Finland, but unlike the others, her body surfaces thanks to the efforts of an ice fisherman on the lake looking for other prey.  It is the height of the tourist season, being close to Christmas, and the town of Koppe depends heavily on its tourists:  ‘The Home of Father Christmas!’  ‘See the Northern Lights!’  ‘Skiing – Saunas – ice swims!’  A dead body could be very off-putting, so the local police inform the unfortunate woman’s British family that she has had a fatal accident, and would anyone care to come and collect their loved one’s remains?

            Alex Evans, Lobbyist (he hates his job but loves the money), makes the trip, for the awful news has left his parents in disarray;  his mother is felled by a heart attack and his father won’t leave her side – Alex himself feels enormous guilt because he didn’t get on with his sister Vicky;  he considered her irresponsible and a spendthrift and, at the age of 26, capable of making more mature decisions about her life:  now she’s gone, and he didn’t even let her know his new phone number months after he changed it.  He is bereft.

            And totally unprepared in his Burberry raincoat and leather shoes for the subzero climate of Koppe;  fortunately local police chief Agatha Koskinen is aware of his ignorance and has brought boots and jackets to the airport, saving him from certain weather-induced death - and the awful news that the post-mortem has revealed that Vicky’s death was not accidental:  she has been murdered.

            It was agonising enough to have to be the family member to identify ‘the body’, but to think that his sister met her death by someone else’s hand infuriates Alex. He decides to stay on for a few days to see what he can find out and, apart from hearing about the other missing women (the locals are great gossips), it is clear that Agatha has a murky history of her own:  this is the Town of Secrets, as well as Santa Claus.

            There are parallel flashbacks to 1998 throughout the story, recounting the circumstances of the first young woman to go missing and revealing the Viper’s nest a small town can be as people try to survive in a land of extreme weathers.  Jo Spain has painted a bleak but beautiful picture of life, love and lust in a cold climate and all her characters are credible and well-drawn without being the least formulaic.  This book is the ideal holiday read (if you’re lucky enough to have one!)  FIVE STARS.