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At last . . . Someone has got around to writing a plausible book set amidst the online and chatroom culture. Fat-armed Wife and Call Girl meet up in The Velvet Rooms. This is the escapist corner of cyberspace, where dancing and chat (not all of it clean, naturally!) go side by side. They fall in love, and decide that they have to meet in real life – and the fact that Fat-armed Wife is married is a minor distraction. They're separated by the Atlantic – one in Massachusetts, the other in Hull. But suddenly an online flirtation turns nasty, and they have a killer on their trail. But their friends in cyberspace haven't forgotten them . . . THE VELVET ROOMS is very clever and inventive, but not a book to be read in one sitting – the authenticity of the chat room scenes ensures that (maybe we shouldn't ask how long North spent on his research!) But all the mis-spellings, slang and abbreviations you'd expect are there, meaning this isn't something you can read fast. And of course the dysfunctional characters are present, those people who while away their time online to avoid having to confront that nasty big world out there. I'm not sure North actually likes his cast very much, which becomes slightly problematic when the fairly conventional genre ending comes along and you're asked to root for them. With the exception of Fat-armed wife, you never really get to know the people behind the screen names. And they don't seem the sort of people you want to admire anyway, with the possible exception of the Dancing Master, who we don't see enough of off-screen, so to speak. THE VELVET ROOMS is edgy, dark crime fiction for the cyber age. A little more fleshing out of its characters would have turned a good book into an outstanding one.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, March 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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