John Parker is a Graduate-qualified English/Spanish Teacher, owner and director of CHAT ENGLISH, an English Language Centre in Avilés on the north coast of Spain . A voracious reader, he has particularly loved horror fiction for many years.
We are in Dublin, 1982. Parish priest Father Noel Timoney discovers two sisters who have not been seen for months, dead in their home. One is seated in an armchair surrounded by religious tracts while the other is upstairs, below her bed. It appears that they have both starved themselves to death.
Over in New York, Francesca McNamara, sister of the deceased is in New York, a struggling actress who has tasted success in the past but is now reduced to bit parts on TV shows if she is lucky. Francesca reads a rather perturbing letter from one of the sisters, talking about hearing Satan rather than the Virgin Mary talking to her. Next she hears from her brother Philip about the deaths of their two sisters via flatmate Máirin who ends up lending her the money to travel back to Ireland.
Back in Dublin, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are pretty sure that there is more to these strange deaths than just suicide. While hard to actually prove, there seems to be evidence that somebody actually watched the sisters die.
Billed as “The first in a powerful new crime trilogy set in 1980s Dublin, exploring the power of the Catholic Church and the powerlessness of unmarried women”, Nicola White’s novel is a slow burner that picks up pace as it moves along. She builds up the atmosphere and makes us want to learn more about the characters. Swan and Considine make a good team, which bodes well for future novels by White while Father Timoney in particular is an interesting character and one to feel sorry for because of his situation as a “nobody” in a dead-end parish. He dreams of a better church and more relevance to his life.
As I said before, the book takes its time in setting things up but the finale makes it worthwhile. Certainly worth a read.
