POPULAR FICTION
WENDY HOLDEN
WHISTLE IN THE DARK by Emma Healey (Viking £12.99)
ANOTHER book about a teen-ager abducted in the Peak District. As a resident, can I urge authors to go elsewhere! Location apart, I enjoyed this latest from the Elizabeth Is Missing author.
Jen, whose daughter Lana vanished for four days in You Know Where, is frustrated. Lana won’t say what happened, but all manner of horrid evidence — used condoms, a gashed head — seems to point to some-thing ghastly.
Jen tries to crack the mystery, but she’s got a lot on her plate, what with competition at work, a smarty-pants husband and an older daughter who’s a pregnant lesbian.
I didn’t like Lana — she’s unforgivably obnoxious and rude to her loving, worried mother. But I adored the forensic detail of Healey’s writing and the wry, sharp take on millennial family life.
THE WISDOM OF SALLY RED SHOES by Ruth Hogan
(Two Roads £14.99) WHILE not quite hitting the heights of Hogan’s lovely debut, The Keeper Of Lost Things, this book has plenty of spirit and heart.
Masha is grieving for her dead son, while Alice, who has cancer, is preparing to leave hers behind.
Masha finds solace in the local graveyard, where she makes up characters for the names on the stones and talks to the exuberantly shod heroine of the title.
Sally, a joyful, foul-mouthed tramp, is a kind of cross between The Lady In The Van and Pollyanna.
Slowly, under her influence, Masha finds meaning in life again, while Alice reaches a similar concord with death.
While I found it over-sad and, occasionally, a bit contrived, I enjoyed the urban setting and quirky characters.
SHOULD YOU ASK ME by Marianne Kavanagh
(Hodder £8.99) WHEN two bodies are unearthed in a Dorset field, an old woman turns up at a police station claiming to know who they are. This is our first sight of the indomitable Mary Holmes, who — like a latter- day Scheherazade — takes several days to spin out the story of a long-ago love triangle.
She seems an unlikely conduit for all the guilt, violence, obsession and murder, but then William, the listening policeman, has secrets of his own.
Out they come as he listens to Mary: his tragic wartime mistakes, his hopeless passion for a glam evacuee.
Kavanagh is a perceptive and vivid writer and this tale of ordinary lives transformed by extraordinary events has so much period atmosphere, you can practically hear the air-raid sirens.