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HIDDEN
by Katy Gardner
Michael Joseph, August 2006
352 pages
10.99GBP
ISBN: 0718146816


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The plot of Katy Gardner's HIDDEN feels like about 20 other suspense novels you've read before. Single mother meets man of dreams. Sprog disappears. Man of dreams looks dodgy. Heroine ends up in various femjep situations which make the long-suffering reader grind their teeth.

To be fair, the book's not awful. I zipped through it at a reasonable rate, but I have to admit that part of that might have been to see if the ending was going to be as blindingly obvious as I thought it might be. I did guess whodunit, but that might well be because there's not exactly a cast of thousands to choose from and because I have a nasty feeling I read so much crime fiction that I can now second-guess the authors!

Mel Stenning is a single mum with a seven-year-old daughter Poppy. They live in London and Mel works for an estate agent's. One quiet day she gets a call from a man who wants to sell his flat immediately. And yes, it's love at first sight.

Simon is an artist whose muse appears to have deserted him. Despite the fact he's decidedly cagy about his past, Simon ands Mel get married, and move to Kent where they plan to renovate a dilapidated warehouse and turn it into a bed and breakfast place.

Poppy seems to resent the arrival of a little brother, Jo. She and Mel are playing hide and seek one night in the warehouse. Suddenly Poppy disappears and Mel hears Simon's car driving away. Oh and incidentally, police had arrested him the day before on suspicion of murder.

In many ways HIDDEN is a bog-standard psychological thriller. And while Gardner is good at evoking the spooky atmosphere of the warehouse and the surrounding coast and boatyard, the rest of it is pretty average.

The main problem is that none of the characters are in the least likeable. Mel is a drip, to put it mildly. She's clingy, needy and insecure, and the kind of person you'd run a mile to avoid.

DCI Dave Gosforth is portrayed as your stereotypical dim plod. I think Gardner might have been trying to draw comparisons between his happy family life and Mel's shambolic record, but if she was it was all a bit clumsy. And that goes for the book in general. The prologue nearly put me off it completely.

The second half is stronger than the first, as Gardner appears to have lost her rather annoying habit of peppering her prose with adjectives -- why use one when two will do!

If I had one word to describe HIDDEN, it would be average.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, August 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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