Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
The disappearance of a teen-age girl in Phoenix
in 1996 makes for a promising prologue but hopes are squashed when that’s followed
by the introduction of a fat bourgeois protagonist:
a wannabe socialite with a problem son and a husband on the wrong side of forty.
Despite the initial titillation is this to be no more than a classy domestic fracas
from across the pond?
Not quite, Her
Pretty Face is more like a tiramisu with razor blades. We are in Seattle over two decades after the
girl vanished in Arizona. Seattle, and a
superficially established world of professional men whose elegant wives are
concerned as much with appearances as they are with the problems of their
spoiled or neglected offspring. The maverick is Frances; overweight and low on
self-esteem, she is on the verge of giving up when she is befriended by Kate:
slim, beautiful, arrogant, with a handsome lawyer husband and a placid son who takes
Marcus under his wing. Marcus is Frances’ unhappy boy, volatile and vulnerable,
bullied at school. Then there is the ravishing Daisy, Kate’s other child. Rebel
and jail bait, Daisy anticipates the Stockholm syndrome even in advance of its event.
This classy community is served by an elite
private school where adolescent students, male and female, are not so much paragons
of gilded youth as a horde of foul-mouthed hooligans. Despite lives crammed
with schedules: soccer, music, video games, pride of place is given to drugs and
alcohol. These children are bored to distraction while their parents are
unaware of the one thing they prize even before money and appearance and that’s
status. When it’s threatened they turn into rabid wolves.
I could not engage with any of these characters;
the baddies were risible and if any of the others were on the side of the
angels it was insignificant. As a drama it might have survived on action and
plot; there were occasional sparks signalling that it was about to take off, but
they burned out: flash and it was gone. The style was integral: colloquial and cloying.
This novel missed its target.
