NEVER TELL

Maureen Carlyle is a reviewer, past judge of the Ellis Peters Award and is involved in the theatre and a keen archaeologist.

This is another of those books – there seems to be a rash of them at the moment – told in the first person and split between two dates ten years apart – in this case the early 1990’s and the early 2000’s.  The narrative jumps between the two in a fairly arbitrary fashion, and is sometimes confusing as a result.

Rose Miller is leading what appears on the face of it to be an idyllic life; an Oxford graduate and former famous trouble-shooting journalist, she is married to an A list rock musician with three delightful small children.  She has put her international career on hold and works part-time on a local newspaper to keep her hand in.

But 10 years earlier, as a student at Oxford, she had become involved in a secret society known as Society X, which staged satanic rites and carried out desecrations of churches, led by a charismatic young man named Dalziel, whose father was a top politician.  The antics of Society X had eventually led to drugs, crime and tragedy.

She believes she has put all this behind her until she gets a chance to interview an Arab multi-millionaire who has a mansion in her locality.  The past then begins to haunt her with a vengeance.

The plot is labyrinthine and the writing taut, and I wish I could say that I enjoyed it.  But it doesn’t contain a single sympathetic character.  They are all rich and utterly unscrupulous.  Why is there this fascination with these so-called celebrity types?  Are these the people we want to read about?