2005 thriller/mystery; sixth of Granger's novels of Fran Varady,
would-be thespian and amateur sleuth. Fran didn't want to get involved
again with Mickey Allerton, a strip club owner whom she's run into
before, but he wants her to track down a dancer who's run off. And
he's keeping her dog to make sure she does it.
Finding Lisa at her parents' place in Oxford is easy enough; but
that's when things start to go wrong. Lisa is angry, scared, and
unwilling even to listen to Fran, but she's too confrontational to be
interesting; and, alas, the repeated cycles of Fran trying to talk to
her, and Lisa putting her off with the same objections, become tedious
to the reader (as, clearly, they also are to Fran, but she keeps
coming in with the same approaches rather than saying anything new).
Even after Fran finds a body and gets involved with the police
investigation, this cycle continues. I felt that Lisa needed to be a
bit more sympathetic, or at least a bit less stupid; as things are,
it's just tiresome to read about her.
Naturally Fran gets involved with a member of the Oxford police, DS
Haley Pereira (in order to humanise her contact with the
investigation); while I can see why the story needed to be set out of
London, so that Allerton would have a limited range of resources to
deploy, it's a shame that we couldn't have had the recurring character
of DI Janice Morgan, or at least someone else who isn't, as Pereira
is, extremely like Morgan except for a couple of surface details.
There's plenty of Oxford geography, though no need to follow along on
a map. Still, Fran's native habitat is London, and she fits better
there.
This feels more like a late-nineties book (when the series started)
than an mid-two-thousands one; Granger was born in the 1930s, and
while she clearly feels the need to mention The Internet the way she
does it (with an antisocial, nocturnal, unhygienic loner who happens
to be Fran's upstairs neighbour) would have been embarrassingly dated
even when this came out in 2005. And mobile phones are treated as a
scarce resource. More seriously, one character is unable to walk, and
his being "stuck in a wheelchair" is treated as a life-destroying
affliction.
As for the plot itself, it's clear that something is going on beyond
what Fran's been told, but Granger omits one key piece of information
in a very obvious way which tries to avoid giving the clue too
blatantly but leaves the reader working on meta-plot data rather than
the same set of information that Fran's using.
For all that, Granger's writing of Fran's internal voice remains
interesting enough that I forgive her the problems. The ending is
generally downbeat, but in a way that works. Followed by Rattling the
Bones.
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