The Wrong Sister

Claire Douglas is an experienced writer of thrillers in which women lead the cast of characters.  In her latest novel, two sisters find themselves stalked and threatened by mysterious men.  One such hisses at Tasha “you owe me” whilst another physically attacks Alice. 

The fear that the women feel, in The Wrong Sister, is heightened by Tasha’s twin daughters, Flossie and Elsie, whose innocence and vulnerability make frightening events more terrifying.  How can these little angels be protected?  The unease of the situation is further exacerbated by the fact that the sisters have already lost, during childhood, a younger sibling, Baby Holly.

Those who have experienced the loss of a new-born know that the worst can, and does, happen and, for this reason, Tasha and Alice are highly sensitised to danger.  Alice is a successful biochemist, whose whole life is based on the rational, but she is spooked by a mist-covered pond beyond the garden of the house in which the twins are being raised.

Along with her husband, Kyle, Alice is babysitting her nieces at the family home, having exchanged her own luxury flat in Venice with Tasha and spouse, Aaron.  Although the canals sparkle romantically and the palaces and churches look beautiful in the October sunshine, at night the waterways seem weird: as sinister as they are in the film, Don’t Look Now.

In Daphne Du Maurier’s story, a grieving couple travel to Venice after their daughter drowns in the garden pond.  They spot a diminutive, red-hooded figure running over bridges.  Eventually the husband corners the small creature.  It is not his daughter in her little red raincoat, but a murderer with a slashing knife.

Alice, who laughed that she was life-swapping with her sister, ends up in hospital after an attack in Tasha’s home during which her husband is killed. It seems that the sisters may have, inadvertently, arranged a death-swap, underlined by a hand-delivered note addressed to Tasha stating, ‘it should have been you”.

The three generations, two grandmothers, two women in their prime, and two little girls are at the centre of the novel.  They are ably supported by another woman, police liaison officer, D C Chloe Jones. 

Around them circle men: Kyle, who seemed to have unexplained riches and Aaron who is mates with local criminal, Shane. Investigating officer, D I Philip Thorne is unsmiling and uncompromisingly suspicious. In France, Eamonn was paying unwelcome attention to Jeanette. In Venice, the strange, blade-carrying man intimidated Tasha. 

Interwoven into the narrative are italicised sections which seem to give the viewpoint of a perpetrator.  But there may be more to the story than one plotter/killer.  Alice and Tasha have similar physiques, and long red hair.  Who was the target? One or both?  Who is the villain? Is there more than one?  Was Kyle’s death an error or a planned murder?  And whatever happened to Baby Holly? 

The sisters’ mother, Jeanette, travels from France where she has been sheltering, away from her memories of Chew Norton where Baby Holly was born.  Returning to Somerset, she competes with Aaron’s mother, Viv, in the who-can-give-the-most-support stakes.  Elsie and Flossie, as would be expected, are being shielded from discussions about the violence which took place as they slept upstairs.

Douglas has a page-turning plot which references Don’t Look Now: a garden pond, a child lost, a sojourn in Venice, a handsome husband murdered, a beautiful and elegant widow.  But Douglas’s characters do not come alive under her pen in the same way as Du Maurier’s; the dialogue and internal monologues are clunky and unconvincing. 

works cited

Douglas, C. The Wrong Sister. Penguin. 2024.

Du Maurier, D.’ Don’t Look Now’. Not Long After Midnight. Gollancz. 1971.

The original version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on 30th March 2024. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Little Bones

Some writers refuse to include women victims in their work, and there is a competition, the Staunch Book Prize, which “rewards crime novels in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”.  Patricia Gibney would not be able to enter her 10^th Lottie Parker outing, Little Bones, into this contest. 

Gibney, it seems, agrees with the Scottish author, Val McDermid, who states, “not to write about it is to pretend it is not happening”.  And as this title suggests, it is not only women who suffer violence in Little Bones, it is children. 

Of course, in her birthplace of Co. Westmeath, Gibney would know that there are many young women and their offspring in mass graves at the mother and babies’ “home” at Castlepollard.

And the 2022 immolation of two children in a car fire set by their mother, in nearby Multyfarnham, underlines the occurrence of attacks against little ones.  Violence against children, Gibney must think, should be written about or, as McDermid says, we choose to “pretend it is not happening”.

This novel, first published in 2021, opens with an infanticide and the secret incarceration of the corpse under a fairy tree on a hillside.  The newborn would have been better “stolen” away by fairies “to the waters and the wild” as the human child was in Yeats’s poem.  Instead, for this little girl, “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand”. 

Years later the bones are discovered, and Detective Inspector Lottie Parker searches for a link between them and cases in her current portfolio, involving abduction and murder.  Two women’s bodies have been discovered with the scars of razor cuts on the soles of their feet and both have a razorblade in their possession. 

In Little Bones, Gibney hints that her protagonist Lottie Parker has, in her previous iterations, had serious problems with alcohol.  Now sober, she is struggling with many aspects of her domestic life, including tidiness, leading her to be envious of the clinically organised houses that she enters during her investigation. 

But the absence of the homely mess of personal belongings indicates something amiss in the psyches of Isobel and Joyce, the victims at the centre of Little Bones.  And maybe this mental aberration will prove a clue in the search for the perpetrator of the devastating crimes being committed on Lottie’s manor. 

On the paperback’s cover are two short sentences: “Their mothers lied. They paid with their lives”. For two generations of children, the “kettle on the hob” of Yeats’s text does not “sing peace into the breast”; rather the “warm hillside” is an isolated place without the CCTV cameras that Lottie needs if she is to identify the criminals and bring them into custody.

Gibney has created a world of imagined towns and villages near Sligo, in which women are not only victims but competent professionals.  Lottie has female colleagues on her team who contrast with the feckless and/or violent male suspects getting interrogated.

Men are the active villains: women the passive victims, but between these two extremes are decent, hard-working officers of both genders, endeavouring to catch those responsible for the horror. 

In a series such as the Lottie Parker novels it is satisfying to follow a team of law enforcers developing work-based and personal relationships.  Lottie herself is an engaging character as she fights her own muddle at home, as well as the organised chaos of unread files and neglected leads down at the station.

Readers of Little Bones may well be encouraged to obtain the first nine books and numbers 11, 12 and 13 which have already been launched. 

works cited

Gibney, P. Little Bones. Sphere.

Yeats, W B. The Stolen Child 1889

A version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on March 16th 2024. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Argylle

Elly Conway explains that the inspiration for her novel Argylle was a “beautiful photograph of a mountain range in southern Poland”. The soon-to-be-released film, also named, Argylle is marketed as “the most incredible spy franchise since Ian Fleming”. 

Bryce Dallas Howard in the movie Argylle

In the movie the “introverted” novelist, Elly Conway, is a character whose espionage story has come true in the real world.  In the book, Conway is nowhere to be seen except in the citations. 

Instead, the reader is cast deep into a world in which CIA operatives, heroically, if incompetently, battle historic Nazi wrongs, alongside the all-too-immediate danger of deadly Russian agents working for an immensely rich master villain. 

It’s a fast narrative ride, located in photogenic areas such as the Golden Triangle in South East Asia and, yes, the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland.  Ride is the key word as ‘the team’, sometimes led by the eponymous Argylle (in this world of equal opportunities members share the leadership role) mount motorbikes, speedboats, buses and trains, whilst airborne transport buzzes around the skies, including small planes and helicopters, which, periodically, crash. 

Henry Cavill in the movie: Argylle

With these exquisite backdrops and plenty of flames and gunfire it is all very filmic and could have been written for transmutation into a screenplay.  Characterisation, on the other hand, is sparse.  Argylle, himself, has a complex backstory but this has served to traumatise him so that he is unable to trust anyone.  His preference for isolation ensures that, just as no one knows him, so he knows no one. 

Like much of the 007 franchise, Argylle’s operational boss is a woman, Frances Coffey.  She, a former librarian and archivist, regards her young protégé in a maternal manner although this is mitigated by her ruthless attitude to all her recruits.  They have been selected to face suicidal missions and thus her relationship with them is, perforce, truncated. 

Coffey, who, as boss, is not on the front line, survives and will, presumably, re-emerge in the next book and she has some personality.  We know that she has a husband and a lover and is fighting her addiction to cigarettes.  Sometimes Coffey takes the role of focaliser, as does Dabrowski, a senior agent who is holed up in Montana, but most of the time Argylle is centre stage. 

There is an episode on Mount Athos in which ‘the team’ manage to achieve their aims without, mercifully, killing any monks.  Another set piece takes place at a ceremony in Monaco with a choreographed son et lumière providing lights and soundtrack for all the action. 

Argylle is suspicious that there is a double agent amongst his comrades, but will he be able to identify the culprit before he, they or everyone is killed? 

Conway seems to have worked hard, researching the genre from way back when, perhaps finding inspiration from such post-war thrillers as Eric Ambler’s Background to Danger and Lawrence Durrell’s White Eagles Over Serbia.  Much more recent franchises like Lee Child’s Reacher and Mission Impossible as well as James Bond might also be in the mix.

Taylor Swift. Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The Recording Academy

There has been speculation about Elly Conway – including the bizarre allegation that she is Taylor Swift. Conway states that having been felled by a terrible accident the creative process became part of her recovery therapy and that she wrote the novel whilst waitressing in a diner.

But it does not matter a jot even if, after being fed the entirety of the genre, AI churned out the prose.  Argylle is fun to read and its roller-coaster plot keeps the mystery intact until the final pages. 

Works cited

Conway, E. Argylle. Bantam Press. 2024.

A version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on 27th January 2024. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor. 

The Twat Files

In The Twat Files Dawn French seems unaware of the definition, which most people know, of the word ‘twat’.  It is an offensive term for vagina and can be used, like many other swearwords, to demonise or diminish women.  In this highly selective memoir, French explains that, for her, a ‘twat’ is a stupid person or someone who does something very silly.  She sees herself, essentially, as a hugely ‘twattish’ person.

In the book, which is also marketed as a self-help text, French urges her readers to embrace the ‘twattishness’ in themselves.  They should learn to free up the happiness that self-created cockups can produce, and just enjoy them in all their ‘staggering stupidity’.  French has enough memories of her own ‘twattery’ to share for an entire book and she is keen to reveal them all.

The anecdotes are divided into sections such as ‘Royal’, ‘Theatre’, ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Elton John’ so that chronology is sacrificed, although her teenage ‘twatteries’ open the book. These are, of course, as painful to readers as they must once have been to her.  Those terrible, inappropriate reactions to a first kiss or that total embarrassment of having the wrong clothes at a gymkhana. 

Once she is in her majority, it is easier to laugh along with French, as she recounts a particular meeting with Prince, now King, Charles. Having seen her acting in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the royal personage quips, ‘I saw your Bottom’, referring to the part she played, at which point French ripostes, ‘And now you’re going to see my Beaver’.  She’s acting in a version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Upstaging the future king is, perhaps, quite ‘twattish’. 

Elton John may not have noticed her entrance to his 50th birthday party as Michael Jackson’s chimp, Bubbles.  It would have been impossible for him to tell who was engulfed in the thick, heavy fur and probably hard to recognise her then husband, Lenny Henry as the rock star (not really a physical double) in whiteface.  What a pair of ‘twats’.  Luckily, security guards manoeuvred the couple around the birthday boy whilst French, inside the suit, was so meltingly hot, that they had to leave immediately.  The inappropriately attired couple walked through the entrance and straight out through the exit.

Originally the material was used in the show, Dawn French is a Huge Twat and so the audio version of The Twat Files is a rewarding way to experience the book.  Read by French, it is fun to hear her relate these tales against herself, with little squeaks and giggles at her own silliness.  There is plenty of name-dropping, but she is a celebrity after all and it is much more fun to hear about her girly crushes, and gushes, when they focus on men like Dustin Hoffman, Phil Daniels and Johnny Depp. 

French relates the awful things that she has said, but the sections which make for uneasy reading are those in which, as a self-confessed fat girl with bosoms which lag behind her when she is in motion, she laughs at her own physicality.  The Vicar of Dibley puddle joke is an example of ‘twattishness’, a classic which has been re-produced in many clips and Gifs as French, playing Geraldine, jumps into deep muddy water and then turns, gurning at the camera.

Many laughs stem from another person’s discomfort and only a hair’s breadth separates what is hilariously funny from what is deeply painful. French tends to avoid the elephant in the room just as she does with the definition of ‘twat’. Fat shaming yourself is no less reprehensible than doing it to another. But French’s mantra is that laughing at yourself is healthy and she hopes that The Twat Files demonstrates how to do this, and also makes her lots of money.

works cited

French, D. The Twat Files. Penguin. 2023.

Dawn French is a Huge Twat. Theatre. Dir. David Grandage. 2022.

A version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on 25th November 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.