"One Woman Crime Wave" by Bee Rowlatt

This book will probably appeal to reading groups who are looking for a light, easy read with a contemporary feel. 

Ashleigh is the babysitter that the posh mums recommend to one another, never realising that, when they are out for the evening, she is searching through their possessions, ferreting out their secrets and taking souvenirs.

It's a great premise for a book and it opposes poor Ashleigh, the intelligent kid from the single-parent home, against rich Tara, the wife who has it all and yet has nothing, who hates the empty chatter at dinner parties and yet turns vicious when standards of service aren't exactly as she expects them to be. These are two great characters and the tension really builds up in the first half if the book.

But then it all falls apart. After the inevitable discovery, the tight drama degenerates into a thriller. Suddenly we have a drug dealer and an attempted child abduction, and another child under threat, and somehow in all this noise the original plot is lost in the muddle and the resolution is, at best, partial. Either the author didn't know how to resolve the plot, or she didn't trust herself to keep the reader's attention through the resolution, or she felt the need to spin the story out into a longer one.

There seems to be a common belief with some novels and a lot of TV 'drama' series that excitement equals action when the opposite is often the case.

The structure of the book was further undermined, in my opinion, by the prologue. A lot of modern novels like to start with a few pages taken from the middle of the action. Of course these pages are intended to hook and to tantalise but they mustn't give too much away. I suppose they are there because the main story takes a little time to get going. In fact this book would have been a lot better if the prologue had been scrapped (and not just because it was taken from the poor second half of the story). If you want to start 'in media res', start with Ashleigh in Tara's house, going through her possessions. That was chilling. And now that you have my attention, backtrack a little and explain what's going on.

Nevertheless, Ashleigh was a wonderful character and gave a real insight into the mind of someone who is hugely intelligent, badly damaged by life, and whose behaviour is at best obsessive stalking and at worst borderline psychopathic. And Tara was another villain who was also a victim, someone deserving of sympathy until you realised just how much emotional vandalism she could cause. Of the other characters, Ludi was a little one dimensional and Giles was a total stereotype. Such a caricature may appeal to the target audience but it felt lazy.

The pacing is nearly perfect with the major turning point almost exactly at the 50% mark. The narration is principally from the PoV of Ashleigh and Tara but other chapters are narrated by other more minor characters.

There is also a wonderful satire of the dinner party from Hell which acts, together with the reading group and the school gate mums, as a powerful indictment of the exclusive clique of privilege to which Tara - poor Tara - belongs. 

Selected quotes:

• "Tara's voice was full of exclamation marks and her eyes and mouth were big." (Ch 1)
• "The conversations were already beginning to self-select by gender." (Ch 2)
• "Certain truths applied everywhere ... They all wanted to show some things and hide others." (Ch 3)
• "He was the dry nightmare to her wet dream." (Ch 4)
• "These things were like the honesty of people's bodies, the ultimate give-away, the physical truth. They made everyone the same." (Ch 5)
• "Breaking the ice - no fucking way. It was her life's mission to maintain the permafrost and keep people out of her business." (Ch 7)
• "He expanded on the subject for the rest of the walk home while Tara felt like her side of the conversation could have been maintained by a face drawn on to a paper bag." (Ch 10)
• "Those hate-smiling school-gate mums." (Ch 15): 'Hate-smiling' is a wonderful phrase.
• "These people, they parent so hard it's not even funny. Success at any cost. She'd often heard parents say it, 'We just want the best for them.' She heard that and thought, go on - finish the sentence: the best for them at any price. No matter what." (Ch 17)
• "They'd probably think she was trying to be Robin Hood. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor? No. They had no idea. That was so basic. ... How about forget the poor and infiltrate the rich, penetrate them, eat them from the inside." (Ch 35)
• "Dads weren't anywhere, not even as an insult. Even bloody Christmas was around a mum holding a baby. Joseph in the background like a mug." (Ch 37)

May 2024; 238 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God