Hear a ticking time bomb
A readable hostage drama set in a London cafe has origins much closer to home.
The five years that have passed since the hostage crisis at the Lindt Cafe in central Sydney are enough to clear this competent if not outstanding thriller of any charge of being exploitative.
The author – a former family-law and criminal barrister in the UK and a distant cousin of Virginia Woolf – moved to Hawke’s Bay in 2002 and has made her mark with five previous novels; in 2018, her fifth was shortlisted in this country’s Ngaio Marsh Awards for Crime Fiction.
The strangers of the new book’s title are three customers who happen to be in a cafe in Balham, South West London, when a man who has stormed out after an argument returns with a shotgun, kills the proprietor and holds the others hostage.
Given the respective standard operating procedures of the Australian and English constabulary, no one will be
surprised that the situation does not turn into another Lindt. The fifth and perhaps most important stranger is police hostage negotiator DI Eliza McClean, and one of the book’s nicer elements is how much it teaches us about the delicate process – half science, half art – of what she does.
The hostages – indigent streetie Neil, Rwandanborn nurse Mutesi and high-flying barrister Abi – all have their own backstories, which Norman tells using the now well-worn device of switching between points of view with each new chapter. She maintains a remarkable momentum without using cheap cliffhangers – although there’s a surprise in the back room, a narrative
She maintains a remarkable momentum without using cheap cliffhangers – although there’s a surprise in the back room.
time bomb whose ticking only we can hear.
The book’s major flaw is that it seeks recourse in a single unambiguous villain, which rather undermines the title’s promise: the plot’s main driver is not a secret – nor for that matter are the others’ backgrounds – but rather just stories that haven’t been told yet.
For that reason, the ending feels more like a cop-out than a disappointment. It’s a serviceable and very readable thriller, but a writer who has made a living by being close to the lives of others – she’s also worked on a crisis helpline – might have reached for something more sublime.
THE SECRETS OF STRANGERS, by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin,
$33)