About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

HOT PURSUIT
by Nora Kelly
Poisoned Pen Press, April 2002
200 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 1590580141


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In this fifth Gillian Adams novel, Nora Kelly's academic protagonist has at last left her university position to move to London to share her life with Edward, her lover of many years.  The changes foreseen in OLD WOUNDS, the previous, Arthur Ellis Award-winning novel, have indeed taken place---her mother has died and Gillian has decided to make her commitment to Edward once and for all.  She returns to the city she loved in her youth, but finds it changed almost beyond recognition, reeking of diesel fumes, noisy, more dangerous, and slick with extravagance and expense.  Nor have her friends weathered the years particularly successfully. Her best friend, Charlotte, especially, has fallen on hard times.  Once a successful television presenter, a loving wife, excellent cook, and devoted mother, she has slumped into a chain-smoking alcoholic stupor from which Gillian can only occasionally rouse her.  Her daughter, the glowing Olivia, a budding film actor, might seem to be leading a charmed life, except that she is being stalked by a deranged young man, Kevin, who may be her greatest fan or her deadliest enemy.

The mood of HOT PURSUIT, despite its title is, like OLD WOUNDS, reflective and even melancholic.  Though Gillian has come to England to start a new life,  it is the past that preoccupies her and the past that holds the key to Charlotte's despair and Olivia's peril.  Confronted by the changes in London life and by her friend's decline, Gillian is acutely conscious of her own advancing years.  Among the many attractive elements in this novel is certainly Kelly's success in portraying a woman in her middle years as a convincing mature adult who is under no illusions about how old she is and who feels both comfortable with the fact and under no compunction to deny it.

 

Calling HOT PURSUIT a cosy, let alone dismissing it as one, would be seriously to underestimate this novel.  It is true that it contains many of the features of the sub-genre: amateur sleuth (though strictly speaking, Gillian here is more of an observer than a sleuth), domestic crime, lack of gore, even a detective boy-friend.  But what redeems it from any suggestion of cliché is the quality of the prose and the seriousness of Kelly's approach.  This is a novel about age and change, to which we are all subject, and though it has a strong plot and moments of considerable tension, what remains with the reader after the book ends is the sense that we have been treated with respect by its author, with the same respect that she extends to her characters and their lives. We should be grateful to Poisoned Pen Press for reprinting this entire series and publishing the new ones.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2002

This book has more than one review. Click here to show all.

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]