|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
1972 was a summer of love. Students Kate Mayfield, Danny Ivanisovic and Simon Willis are staying at Simon's uncle's Hertfordshire home supposedly engaged in landscape gardening. In reality they are holidaying hard, with Kate enjoying the delights of illicit love with Danny (she's supposed to be fruit-picking in France) while she inflicts her terrible cooking on the two boys. Into this golden summer steps Trudie Finch, a young free-spirit on the run and looking for a place to stay. Trudie's presence unbalances the status quo and threatens Kate, especially when Trudie gets friendly with Danny. The disturbances and then tensions rise in the group culminating in tragedy when the ghosts of an old murder come back to haunt them. This is a slowly starting book. Diane Janes skilfully weaves the past and present together into a net that catches you without your realising that you just have to keep turning the pages to find the heart of the mystery. The atmosphere of the early 70s and a hot summer without air-conditioning flies off the page. The characters, too, are well-drawn - golden-boy Danny, quiet, loyal Simon and Trudie, fey and headstrong, who unwittingly forces secrets to the surface that will lead to disaster. And Kate, the narrator, a woman who was once naive, but who has now grown accustomed to secrets and the lies that must be told to hide them. As she tells her tale, you slowly realise that the key secret is not what happened to Trudie, but what happened to Danny. Anthea Hawdon lives in the North East of England and has spent her working life in and around the NHS; she consequently takes refuge in fiction as much as possible.
Reviewed by Anthea Hawdon, August 2010
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
