Blue Monday by Nicci French, Michael Joseph, $29.99.
Nicci French is actually the pseudonym of UK crime writing husband and wife duo Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, and while the split personality of their voice is not immediately apparent, the duo’s books certainly benefit from the carefully crafted pace changes and character analyses that you can’t help but glean when two minds come together.
Blue Monday marks a new direction for the pair, with the creation of Frieda Klein, who is the central character of this and their next seven novels. Frieda is a psychotherapist who turns police informant and sleuth in this dark and fascinating thriller, when she suspects her latest patient might be implicated in the child abduction case currently flooding the front pages of every newspaper.
Matthew Farraday has red hair, alabaster pale skin and a mass of freckles. His face, splashed across the tabloids, already looks like that of a boy lost and alone, and as the days gather in the build-up to Christmas, the chances of finding him alive dwindle for Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson.
So when a psychotherapist (Frieda) walks through his door and tells him that one of her patients is describing an uncontrollable longing for a child exactly like Matthew he sits up and takes notice.
Frieda Klein is a compelling character, driven and single-minded, sharp and deep-thinking, but secretive, with layers of vulnerability that we only begin to glimpse as the chase to find Matthew gathers.
Missing children are at the heart of this troubling story, a subject no doubt prompted by author Nicci Gerrard’s other job as a journalist for Britain’s Observer newspaper, for which she covered the real-life murder trials of child killers Fred and Rosemary West and Ian Huntley, and that sense of veracity gives the tale a biting edge.
The novel opens with the disappearance of five-year-old Joanna outside a sweet shop on her way home from school, some 20 years earlier, and very quickly we realise there are links between what happened to this little girl and the abduction of Matthew Farraday.
What follows is at once alarming and impossibly compelling with twists that just don’t stop turning, but the underlying power of the book is in its genuine and fascinating characters, who develop as the narrative gathers pace, their faces — not least those of the killers — coming into sharper focus as we gallop to a finish that even the most forensic mind couldn’t foresee.
About the Author: NICCI FRENCH
Journalists Nicci Gerrard, 53, and Sean French, 52, writing together as Nicci French, have become one of the UK’s best-selling crime writers. They married in 1990 and five years later began their first joint novel.
“To write, you have to have a difficult combination of faith and self-doubt,” says Nicci. “Perhaps, if I hadn’t met Sean — aged 30, with a broken marriage and two extremely tiny children at my side — then I never would have made the leap from wishing to doing. Writing with Sean is our way of exploring the world together.”
Once they have conceived a novel, they write separately — Sean in the garden shed and Nicci in the study — bouncing chapters between each other by email, each editing and adding as they go.
Blue Monday is their 13th novel and the first of an octet featuring psychotherapist Frieda Klein, “One for each day of the week and then a mysterious eighth,” say Nicci and Sean.
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