by
LESLEY THOMSON
THE BLURB:
A year after her father's death, the detective's daughter inherits a strange new case.
Terry Darnell was a detective with Hammersmith police. Now his daughter Stella has found a folder of photographs hidden in his cellar. Why did he take so many pictures of deserted London streets?
Stella is determined to find out.
One photo dates from 1966, to a day when a little girl, just ten years old, witnessed something that would haunt her forever. As Stella grows obsessed with uncovering the truth, the events of that day begin to haunt her too...
This was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, as I used to live in Hammersmith, the area where the story is set. Weirdly, the author also has the same surname as the guy I was living with at the time, with even the same spelling. He and I remained friends after our break-up but he has now passed; and this was the time of the year when he suddenly died. I also might have an event to attend in Hammersmith soon. Okay, personally haunting/ linking facts aside, let's get on with reviewing this book, which I picked up at the free book exchange section at Southend Station.
Oh, but it all came back to me- the streets in the text were exactly where I played 20 years ago! I've blogged about my ol' home of Hammersmith before and will vlog about it soon; especially regarding down by the riverside and the bridge (Hammersmith Bridge is my favourite Thames bridge, and is one grand old lady...)
This was well-written and current to the culture of Hammersmith but (big spoiler alert!) I did manage to work out that Myra/ Mary/ Marion were the same person. I did (another spoiler alert!) mistakenly think she was the protagonist, and the person responsible for murdering the men involved with killing children in car accidents. It's a horrible theme for a book but this detective novel was written well, with characters who all seemed very realistic. Our main characters Stella and Jack were very different and very daring, and you kind of pick up on a man of two sides with Jack- on one hand he's a responsible train driver and on the other he's a tad whimsical, always looking for signs and has the ability to identify murderers- who he names hosts- or so he thinks. Is the fact that he broke into the house of a “host” realistic, though? Possibly not, but it was written in such a way to make it seem so, if you know what I mean.
The old man in the attic was downright creepy, and once you realise who he is he was none too pleasant in the early parts of the novel, either. But I did like his obsessional model of Hammersmith! This book trips along nicely, and it has certainly inspired me to read more crime novels by this author- the next is set in the same area- but it was the character of little Mary and her relationship with her little brother Michael that seemed the most touching and poignant for me, despite the fact that Mary's capable of doing weird things with angels in graveyards. I actually don't know nearby Ravenscourt Part very well, but I am tempted to venture there to see if the world's longest slide is a work of fiction or not, or at least have a nosey around underneath the railway line.
I'm also glad spreadsheet tables were included as part of the novel, so you could keep a track of who died and when and how, otherwise the story could have ended up being messy to read. Give this a go- I did take a while to get into it, and therefore had to backtrack, but once I did it was unputdownable.
