Review: Blue Monday
Blue Monday. Nicci French. Detective thriller.
This story is a worst nightmare, writes Brian Byrne. The stealing of children. If you're a parent, or the grandparent of little children, it is a book you are tempted not to read.
Frieda Klein is a psychologist who gets drawn into the world of a man on the edge of breakdown. Like her patients, Frieda has her own issues, as do those around her, and they all come in and out of her journey to find an exit from the frightening mental maze in which her patient is lost.
Set in the greyness of Central London and the often grey lives of its inhabitants, the running background to this story is the snatching of a young boy. Both Frieda's quest and the crime run along in parallel until circumstances bring them together. But for us readers, the stolen child is constantly before us. In a very frightening way. One which keeps us in the child's nightmare.
A profoundly disturbing story, it is grippingly narrated by the author, whom I haven't read before but will certainly do again. Because as reader we have the benefit of overviewing the different strands of the plot, we feel we know much more than the protagonist Frieda.
But time and again we find we don't. Nicci French's ability to weave twists and turns and backsteps is formidable and makes Blue Monday an unputdownable read.
Forgive the lack of detail in this review. That's because it is a book too good to spoil by revealing too much in advance.
