Looking for trouble and finding it
Jane Gardam
CATCH ME WHEN I FALL by Nicci French Penguin/Michael Joseph, £12.99, pp. 304, ISBN 0718145216 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Thrillers now come heavily disguised, and but for the bloodstained head-lamp on the jacket of this one and the warning across the corner, ‘Be careful who [sic] you trust. It might just be the death of you’, one would take the book to be a straightforward, if lurid, portrait of a bright girl with an adrenalin problem. Holly Krauss, talented, good-looking and running her own successful business, is attracted to danger and bad company as well as to drink and sexual excess. After a long day in the office she courts sexual, financial and marital disaster of an evening. Bruised, beaten-up and minus items of her underwear, she always limps back to a (very unobservant) kindly husband who works from home as an illustrator. He is enigmatic but constant and sane. ‘Why do I do it, why do I do it?’ is Holly’s silent cry.
The book works because Holly can tell a good tale in the first person and is as open about her weaknesses and as innocent and almost as silly — as Bridget Jones. Now and then her excesses are less disgusting than funny, especially the occasion when a hideous piece of artwork she has ordered in her cups at a drinks’ party in a gallery — she has not a penny to pay turns up and is dumped at her address. But very nasty moments occur too, and are experienced with the same staring eyes. Terrible people appear at her door in the night brandishing knives. They urinate on the floor. They are demanding thousands of pounds in poker debts which she scarcely remembers. London is a sea of throbbing menace. Yet always she is back at her desk next morning, her exhausted loyal team and best friend Meg getting her through. Most of them want to wring her neck. Most believe that she is reeling to her own destruction.
There is in the schoolgirlish, wide-eyed prose the feeling that this clever girl has been abandoned. Is she maybe being dragged into this condition? Has she a particular enemy? Is this just a thriller after all? I have to say that it takes no great sleuth to spot the potential murderer. I got him in the first 60 pages, the clues being heavy-handed. Everyone must have spotted the smell of vanilla.
Nicci French is in fact two people: Nicci Gerard and Sean French who are married and write as a partnership. This is their seventh novel and the arrangement is intriguing. Which one thought of Holly, and why? Who was responsible for the paper chase at the end — similar to Great Expectations? Is the victim gasping her last? It is very well done, exciting. Yet, alas, I couldn’t believe a word of it.
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