Blood Orange

Alison Bailey is a lawyer: alcoholic, volatile, obsessed with a charming and lecherous colleague, and currently defending a murderer called Madeleine Smith who has killed her violent husband. Forget any significance with the Madeleine who poisoned her lover in nineteenth century Glasgow, the name must be coincidental; Blood Orange features ultimate abuse: of others, of oneself. There is an unintended link: both Madeleines and Alison were driven to extremes.

This is Alison’s first murder case and should be her main preoccupation but her relationship with her prim house-husband is rocky despite her role as breadwinner, and her small daughter, adored and adoring, is caught in the cross-fire. A load of maternal guilt, fuelled by alcohol and torrid couplings with her instructing  and priapic  solicitor – all these have Alison riding hell-bent for a cliff hardly needing the spur of obscene anonymous notes to send her over the edge. And yet that same solicitor is a clever lawyer and together they find themselves fighting to save Madeleine from a murder charge complicated by fiendish domestic abuse.

The action lurches from crisis to crisis: from crude sex to domestic bliss and misunderstandings to Madeleine’s ghastly story and back, told in a style that, despite all else, is lush, effusive and sentimental. The twisted ending is a fitting climax: horrid but satisfactory, a product of our time.