Mark Timlin is a British author best known for his series of novels featuring Nick Sharman, a former Metropolitan Police officer who takes up the profession of private investigator in South London. He is also a renowned book reviewer and literary commentator. His most recent work is REAP THE WHIRLWIND. In his early years he did various jobs including work as a member of the road crew for THE WHO, including working backstage at Woodstock in the 1960s on the lighting cranes
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It’s 1989, and here we are again in the land of matrimonial noir, where secrets abound, and someone’s going to come a serious cropper. Works for me!
Leo Creasey, the husband, is an author who’s always broke, likes the sauce rather too much, and is supported by his missus, well off Jenny (blimey, where have we heard that before?), who’s just given birth to Sophie. Leo has baby blues big time, because he’d had a vasectomy his wife knows nothing about, so Sophie couldn’t be his. See what I mean about secrets? and, believe me there’s plenty more to come. Of course vasectomies don’t always take, but let’s not worry about that little detail.
Separately, Hannah Faulkner, the teenage daughter of a couple of Jehovah’s witnesses, who’s been made pregnant by a scion of the community, then cast out with baby Zoe into the wilderness, also suffers with baby blues, but for a totally different reason, and when she and Leo bump into each other, all their lives change forever.
Two babies, then there was one. But whose baby?
That’s the premise of this brilliantly plotted thriller that moves forward from the eighties to 2005 and beyond. By then Leo has become a big success, though he still relies on his wife’s income (authors! what are they like?) and Jenny is even richer, though unfulfilled in the family department because Leo is still firing blanks. Meanwhile Hannah keeps her head down, fearing the wrath of God, living with Zoe her daughter who is blissfully (well maybe not blissfully) ignorant of all the drama she’s involved in.
Keep Her Quiet is as tightly coiled as a Cobra waiting to strike and just as poisonous in the end for the protagonists, and what a shocking end it is.
Curtis’s latest is a prime example of the new wave of UK women crime writers that threaten to sweep the old guard away. More power to them!
