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Allen & Unwin, September 2007
Reviewed by Sally Roddom
The book opens with Krissie Donald dragging her best friend’s lifeless
body over some rocks “...bumping her head from rock to rock...”, an
interesting opening that certainly had me hooked.
Krissie and Sarah have been best friends since they first started school
at four years of age, and they could not have been two more different
personalities. Krissie, a child protection officer, has no desire to
commit to any relationship; she leads a promiscuous life flitting from one
man to another and drinks heavily. Sarah, on the other hand, always
wanting to nurture and protect, took up nursing until she could get
married and have lots of children. Sarah fulfilled one dream when she
married a doctor, Kyle, but their marriage has descended into a baby
making hell as Sarah frantically tries to conceive and lovemaking flies
out the window.
To Sarah’s dismay, Krissie falls pregnant after a one night stand in
Teneriffe and little Robbie duly arrives. Diagnosed as suffering from
postnatal depression, Krissie worries she is turning into a bad mother.
Kyle and Sarah give her a break from the baby by taking her for a camping
holiday in the Scottish highlands. It is here that everything starts to go
wrong and the reader is brought back to the point where the book started.
I really enjoyed the story, black humour with so many twists and turns
that you just didn’t know where author Helen Fitzgerald was going to take
you next. Starting off in the first person with Krissie telling the story,
it occasionally switches to see the story through the eyes of mostly Sarah
and, once or twice, Kyle. This helps expand the story and give it more
depth. There are very descriptive and ghastly scenes of murder which
contrast nicely with the light hearted way the book is written.
This is the first novel by Fitzgerald, an Australian novelist who is now
living in Glasgow. She has written two more books with Krissie Donald as
the heroine, MY LAST CONFESSION due for release in 2008, and BLOODY WOMEN
due out in 2009, and I will be certainly keeping an eye out for them
May 2008 review originally posted on Murder and Mayhem
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