Quercus are publishing this on 26 March – another General Fiction (Adult) Mystery & Thrillers fix. There is something that presses an addiction button with this kind of writing. I’m starting to worry I won’t be able to read anything which has less than a creepy narrator, creaking floorboards, toxic wallpaper, negligent parents and a semi-mute, wild-eyed girl-child to hold my slightly horrified attention from page one. I’ve got hold of Nikita Lalwani’s book (You People) from Penguin UK/Viking/Netgalley, and it is a joy to read such great writing but I’m struggling slightly, as it doesn’t have the ‘crack’ addictive element of mystery/thriller genre fiction. More on that when I’ve finished it…
Magpie Lane: so welcome to Dee, the most grouchy, unreliable-but-strangely-appealing narrator you could wish for, strongly in the vein of Zoe Heller’s character Barbara in Notes on a Scandal. We meet an intriguing cast of characters through Dee’s beady Scots Nanny’s eyes, as she attempts to explain to two detectives the disappearance of her charge, Felicity, from the spooky old college attic where the little girl lives with her remote, show-off clever father, the Master of the college, and her distracted Danish stepmother. Joining the three of them a few months before Felicity’s disappearance, following a chance meeting on the mathematical bridge one July morning – the all-seeing, compassionate-but-critical Nanny Dee.
This is a great yarn, with a touch of the supernatural, a nod to the world of fantasy, a quirky love angle involving a dishevelled permenant student called Linklater, and a great deal of fascinating lore about Oxford smuggled in. I particularly enjoyed the slightly tetchy love-hate relationship Dee and Linklater, each of them misfits in Oxford society, have with the city and the University. Their joyful tours around graveyards and hidden places are the high points of the narrative, and underpin and make more poignant the satisfying twist in the tale.
A great read, something to curl up with and devour on a quiet weekend…
Thanks again to Netgalley and Quercus Books.
Izzy Brown 