"Body Language" by AK Turner

An audio book set in Camden.

Cassie is a mortuary technician, orphaned when young by a car accident. She's bisexual. She has come out of a relationship with Rachel. She used to squat. She's in a different world now though she has piercings and doesn't like the police.

She has one night stands, sometimes Coke. While working (graphically) on a body she realises it's Mrs Edwards, a 50 year old lady who had made Cassie go back into education and get some good A levels. She seemed to have drowned in her bath after drinking. The rarely seen/mentioned Owen, son of Mrs E, is an alcoholic who asked his mother for money. He wants the body released asap. She was engaged to an architect, Christian, based in Germany but often in England. Cassie breaks the news to him. They'd broken up a month or 2 before, having met via a dating site.

Cassie whispers to the bodies. They sometimes talk back. She has hallucinations about Mrs E. An old man's body disappears in the night. Her access code was used.

DS Flight's PoV appears. She moved from quiet Winchester to escape memories of a failed marriage with Matt, and a 28-week stillborn.

The stolen body's recovered from a river, name tag intact. Cassie's mugged. She fights back. Nothing taken.

Cassie fancies Flight and gives her info whose source she doesn't always disclose. She wants Mrs E's cremation delayed so that full tests can be done. She suspects that Christian is a fake who exploits older women. It's true, discovers Flight. But then he's found dead. Maybe Owen's to blame? Cassie collapses in the street - an adrenalin overdose injected while she was walking. The video at the end seems rather contrived but I suppose it's no worse than a final, detailed confession. And the stolen body's explained too.

The mortuary details are believable. Twice the reason for putting brains in formalin is explained.

Other reviews

• Lina Wilson

"Leicester Writes Short Story Prize anthology 2024" (Dahlia Publishing, 2024)

20 stories from nearly 300 entries.

• 1st: All eyes on me - Rara (1st person PoV) sees herself reflected in shop windows (superimposed on mannequins), in mirrors. She and Shayla used to like clubbing, running down this road. She'd settled down with Pete. She watches a mother with 3 kids battling along the road, trying to catch a bus. One of her sons, Manny, is being awkward, dawdling. Manny stares at Rara. Will Pete come back? Actually Rara's the mother.
• 2nd: The maw - The 1st person PoV narrator has cleared her flat and left a suicide note. She goes to a smart hotel in Austria, and befriends a woman (who drinks alone) who invites her to Italy with her husband. She says no and throws herself off a mountain rather than take the pills she'd brought along. The narrative is interrupted by paragraphs that give us her backstory (childless, a cleaner for 25 years, abandoned by her husband, felt that there'd always been a black chasm/maw beneath her) and give us details from the life of Empress Elisabeth (who lived in a nearby palace, who felt trapped by her husband, who became fat and secretive as she aged).
• 3rd: Molly - At 16, the tall, gawky 1st person PoV narrator admired tall, pretty, rebellious Molly and slept with her boyfriend (because Molly didn't). Later she spends 4 years with Julian who grew up in a rich family but wouldn't inherit much money. He's not a nice person, embarrassing and shaming her. One of the rare times he listened to her was when he was going to intervene to stop a kid getting bullied. One day she and Julian pass Molly. She's surprised that Julian and Molly know each other (they probably slept together as students). She didn't tell him she knew Molly too. That night (at the end of the story) "I thought then about the kind of person that takes joy in breaking things. I thought about the kind of person who lets other people break things and does nothing. I thought that perhaps I had been both types. But I had never been a broken thing. ... I do not think I am whole."
• The Nook - The child (1st person PoV) doesn't understand what a "nook" is, or why Americans might have put one in the city. The father grabs him and his brother and they rush from their home, first to the masjid, then they barge onto a bus as buildings topple. Someone in the bus says it's not a nook but a chemical weapon. They reach a car park of dead people. The father dies.
• Pepper soup - Set in America. The woman (1st person PoV) no longer lives with her family. She lived for a while with Fajimi. Her family came for an Xmas meal which he made. It was awkward. Years later, Fajimi took her to a restaurant and said he was going to leave her. She thinks he's in a relationship with her sister. Later she invites him over for a poisoned meal and cuts him up with a cleaver. She invites her sister over, who says the food tastes bad.
• An unrecoverable youth - It's 1918. Joe (3rd person) is returning to his island village after 4 years of war. His mother had died giving birth to him. His father died while he was away. He'd sort-of been engaged to Sarah. She'd sent him a letter saying she'd married. She has a baby now. The story switches between 2nd and 3rd person. We learn that Sarah's under-age brother arrived at the front with Joe weeks after the fateful letter. Joe was on the firing squad that killed him for desertion. Joe was only doing his duty. He feels guilty that he didn't tell the army that Robert was under-age. He reaches the cottage, untouched since his father died. A relative offers to buy it off him, telling him that he has to change. Outside the church, Joe unburdens himself, telling Sarah about Robert. He asks why her family didn't stop Robert joining up. He sells the cottage and leaves the island. He's only 22. He can start again.
• Gigi and me - Tasmin (1st person) has a ghost, Gigi, in her flat. Her lover, Colin, initially puts up with it. It's her 4th ghost. Gigi can press buttons to say words. Colin wants to make money out of her. Gigi encourages Tasmin to block Colin's number (she does) and change the locks (I don't think I get this).
• The observational bias of love - It begins with "You will tell me how you found me and you will lie". The plot is simple enough. It's 1998. An Irish woman (1st person) newly in Italy is kept away from others by her new lover, who doesn't want her to learn Italian. He locks her in their flat when he goes out. She makes him fall from the balcony to his death. The story ends "I will tell them how I found you, and I will lie".
  The telling of the tale is more complex. I don't understand it all. She thinks "You [drip me data] about a character that is not you but is the you I want to imagine you being". She feels he's keeping him like a pet, or a lab animal. She thinks she's happy because he tells her she is. She says "I'll believe in the storia and the romanza". Are these the terms that are used in italian for the narratology terms "plot" and "story"? Another "researcher" watches her from his balcony opposite. Because of this second observer she realises she's not happy. He teaches her Italian. She sneaks out to a bookshop - there's "a photo that looks like me, with the word Perso over it, I will think it should have an 'n' added to make the Perso into 'Person' and then I will see the English underneath saying 'Missing' and I will finally realise that I am lost. And I'll wonder what hypothesis will be proven when the experiment ends. And worry that I could ruin it with a result that may be skewed, now I, the subject, am no longer blind."
• Ugly boys score the goals - The narrator (1st person, male) is investigating a medical trial where the subjects were from old people's homes. The anti-aging drug had a positive initial physical effect, but led to emotional turmoil: a trajectory that matched what his teenage daughter was going through - unrequited love. The drug development is going to be halted. He thinks that everybody has the right to be young again, even if it's only to experience the agony of first love again - it might spur them to success in other fields. He thinks hard about trying the drug.
• You choose - 2nd person PoV, set in the States. You rent out a hunting lodge. You're widowed and childless. Mary (divorced with kids), after 10 years away returns, working at a women's health clinic. A politician who's anti-abortion and pro-guns hires the lodge. For a page the story continues with you shooting him. For half a page he forages for mushrooms (at your suggestion) and dies because he picked poisonous ones. For another page he's killed by a wild boar protecting her young. "After whichever choice you make" you see his death announced on TV from the lodge.
• Back streets - Salman (3rd person PoV) and his wife live with his single mother in Mumbai. He busks for extra money. He's noticed, and records an album. He's told that it flops. Actually it's a hit in the UK - he's been ripped off. Another agent finds him, gets him uk concerts. He becomes rich. His wife is expecting twins. He returns home, unchanged, happy to be back. (I don't think I get this)
• Hiraeth - a son (1st person) is with his dying father in a hospital/hospice. His father had immigrated from (maybe) Hong Kong, running a shop. The son had been pushed to be English - to play cricket, go to Scouts and become a doctor. He ended up writing comics and children's books. He's moved when told that while he was out of the room his father boasted about him. (I think I've seen the plot before)
• The universe inside my skin - A man (1st person PoV) wakes to see a man in his bedroom. He's seen this man before, at scenes of impending death. He recalls the scenes, and other scenes where he's had prescient hallucinations - he'd had doubts about whether he'd chosen the right woman to marry (his life has many branching alternatives ahead), then he saved her life and married her. He dies, and becomes the man who was watching him. (I like this)
• The little shop of proverbs - A man (1st person PoV) in a troubled relationship goes to a shop to get a bespoke proverb for his wife. After a discussion, the shopkeeper suggests he buys flowers instead. He buys flowers, heads back to the little shop. But it's gone. He finds a note in the flowers - "The foolish man grumbles that roses have thorns, but the wise man gives thanks that thorns have roses". (The story uses its 3 pages well.)
• Just the two of us - A newly-divorced father (3rd person) collects his 8 y.o. daughter for the weekend - his first time. He suddenly decides on a treat, driving to a funfair that his father took him to. He's not sure of the way, or if it still exists. He tells his daughter that it was the last time he saw his father. She's scared that it'll be the last time she sees him. He turns back towards his flat hoping she'll enjoy a weekend of TV and pizza.
• Time travel - A mother (1st person) is with her old mother, who was a single mother once diagnosed with suicidal tendencies. The narrator (and her brother Gavin, she learns, and her mother) has flashbacks so vivid it's like time travel. "There's one missing piece. It is 1989, 1995, 2000, 2009. Once. we kept searching for it. Thinking we needed it ... Believing it would make us whole". I think she means a father. She admits that they've kept one thing from her mother (not wanting her to feel guilty?) - that they distrust authority: i.e. men. She needs to get back to 2011 to tell herself "to give love a chance. To trust that it does not always fail. ... There are still roads ahead for me, for Gavin, for mother."
• The walking man - A wanderer (1st person) returns to the home he left when 13. His battered mother had left earlier. His sister is still in the house. Their father is dead. He feels guilty that he left his sister with their father.
• Postcards from the boathouse - "I" recalls reading out Woolf and Plath with "you". When apart, they send each other Polaroids. When "you" moves away and doesn't reply for months, "I" self-harms. "I" receives a photo of a smashed polaroid camera. 1.5 pages.
• Magic numbers - The meaning of numbers from fairy tales - 2 (divided self), 3 (choice), 4 (stabililty), 7 (society), 9 (gestation) - are used by a woman (1st person) to recount her life from a childhood with a mentally unstable mother, through boyfriends and a steady relation to miscarriage and a final (not quite convincing) "we all lied ever after".
• Ephemeral little things - The narrator (female(?) 1st person) is waiting at a train station for her (male?) partner. She's going blind and can't work out all that's going on. She's trying to write things down so that in the years to come he can read the notes back to her. He texts her to say he'll be away another night. She's beginning to have doubts about him.

Several murders, deathbed scenes, single/divorced mothers, and lots of love. The most common theme is how the Self is changed by love (or its loss). An interesting mix.

"The garden" by Harold Monro

A booklet privately published by HappenStance. The text was originally published in 1922. The notes say that Monro was in a failing marriage, coming to accept that he was gay. Reading the booklet, this doesn't surprise me.

Carol Rumens says "He was at heart a Shelleyan romantic who nevertheless responded excitedly to the radical poetics of his age. ... Although he was never a thorough-going Imagist, Monro was no insipid Georgian, either. TS Eliot, for example, who thought very highly of the senior poet, and published him in The Criterion, undoubtedly echoes Monro's style at times in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. ... At times, the writer he seems to resemble most is Virginia Woolf"

The introduction says "Sexuality is not the central theme of The Garden. The poem is about the failure of ideals". I think I must have a dirty mind. Here are some extracts - "He told me he had seen a ruined garden Outside the town ... He said that no one knew The garden but himself; Though hundreds passed it day to day, Yet no one knew it but himself ... The birds, he said, were like a choir Of lively boys, Who never went to school But sang instead ... Mile after mile we walk. He is pleased. Our feet become heavy with dust, and we laugh, And we talk all the while of our future delight ... We lay down weary in the shadow of elms ... it was the garden he had meant: But not the one he had described ... Then suddenly from out his conversation I saw it in the light of his own thought: A phantom Eden ... I did not see that man again Until a year had gone or more. I had not found him anywhere, And many times had gone to seek The garden, but it was not there. One day along the country road There he was ... We saw the garden again in our mutual thought ... Quickly we ran in our joy; Quickly - then stopped, and stared. An angel with a flaming sword Stood large, and beautiful ... The angel dropped his hopeless sword ... And wept into his hands: but we Feared, and turned back to our own world"

"Tormentil" by Ian Humphreys (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

The collection won the RSL's "Literature Matters" award while in progress. Poems come from Bad Lilies, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry London, Poetry review, Rialto, The Dark Horse, etc.

The book (and title poem) begins usefully with "I can't face the big stuff/ so I comb the moors/ for a tiny yellow flower"

• There's interesting imagery on p.14 - e.g. an earthworm is a "silent concertina"
• "Lady Luck" has centred lines. All the lines have a big gap somewhere, except for one line which has two gaps. Some of the gaps are replacements for punctuation. Some aren't. It ends with "On the sea-front      heads turned like waltzers/ the admired your blue-black hair       they gave you extra chips/ Sometimes      they touched you for luck"
• I've read "Gay Bar" by Jeremy Atherton Lin so "Pansies" looks a bit light. I like "rubber pup at the Queer Rights in Chechnya rally" more.
• I like "Walltown", how it wanders while staying on-theme. It starts by considering dry-stone walls - their disrepair, the lack of skilled repairers. The narrator found 4 dead foxes in a walled off field. The biggest wall that the narrator knows of is 30ft high, big enough to hold a river back. But what do the walls in ancient woodland hold back? In his pub they found a bricked-up mummified cat, there to ward off evil spirits. The narrator saw a horse kick down a section of wall. It sniffed the fallen stones, looked into the next field, then decided to stay put.
• There are some tidy plots. In "Petrified", the narrator, about to phone the hospital, sees an insect close to oozing sap. Will it become immortal? The narrator's indecision immobilises him/her. S/he dead-heads roses in the morning's bright stickiness, sweat beading his/her brow.
• "There's a walrus on my windscreen" is based on a cute idea but it's rather too long.
• "When trees burn" After Philip Larkin rhymes!
• I think I've seen "Punch and Judy on the West Yorkshire Moors" before. I still like it.
• I often run out of patience with poems like "Paucity". This time I rather liked it.
• I like "Discarded wardrobe on Deansgate" though it sounds to me like a piece of Flash by (say) Meg Pokrass
• "tormentil +" is tidy. The symmetric petals are compared to compass points, then the poem ends with "why do I feel lost/ when a thousand compasses/ guide the way?"
• "Falling galaxies" starts well - "It's raining stars over the high moor,/ the black sky flecked with slow cinders// coughed from the lungs of a great fire" - and the ending is ok - "and few a few seconds/ my words whiten the cold night air/ like chalk on a blackboard. Like a question."

p.35 and p.38 aren't promising. Nor are p.45, p.48, p.52, p.54, p.65. Overall there are more poems of interest than I usually see in a book.

Other reviews

• Steve Whitaker (the psychological obliteration of ‘Remote’ is mitigated in propitiatory, and profoundly affecting, fashion, as the architecture of long-term memory is circumscribed by the locators of the present – television repeats and Tupperware boxes for favourite cakes. ... above all else, and beyond the much-needed recalibration of attitudes towards homosexuality and prejudice through the medium of acerbically employed wit, lies the mechanism of escape. )

"Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies" by Maddie Mortimer

An audio book.

Lia's cancer has come back. Brain, liver, lungs. Soon after she was breastless she was in a train. There was a little group of drunks. A man fondled her. His mates asked him what her tits were like. He said her nipples were hard. She was grateful.

Harry, her husband, is a lecturer. They have a 12 year-old daughter, Iris. Connie is her friend and confidant.

Cancer is a first-person PoV. It takes tours of her body, can sense when she lies, and has a friend, Red, the red chemo drug. It interrupts and mocks. It mentions Gardener and Fossil. There are multiple choice questions, definitions (autotomy, etc) and doggerel.

Her father, Peter, was a churchman. Her mother Ann becomes a widow by the end of the time-line, but we learn the details only three-quarters through the book. Her parents took in an orphan, Matthew, who she fancied. They had frequent sex before he left for university and before she finished 6th form. He goes away for a year, returning just after she's been unfaithful. The 2 of them, plus female twins she knows from school, have a car crash. She later goes to an Italian commune and stays with him. He leaves her.

A pgrad woman is chasing Harry. Lia says it's not a problem - she gives him permission - "I won't haunt her". Iris hears a rumour at school that Harry is having an affair. She learns that Harry isn't her biological father. Lea doesn't tell her it's Matthew.

Matthew is Fossil and Harry the Gardener?

Some of the text is from Peter's PoV, some is from Ann who begins to doubt after Peter's death. Peter had dementia, died. On funeral day, Matthew returns. He's on a rehab program. She has hopeless sex with Matthew.

Harry thinks that he's failed as a Father, Husband and Human. Matthew (for real?) visits her deathbed. She says that she sometimes thought it was her guilt that had made her ill. He tells her that it was love, and leaves.

Lea catches her final infection from Iris after they'd had an honest talk. Deathbed reconciliations.

Towards the end, cancer/Lea's thoughts become rapid and disjointed. "I am her. She is me. We always have been. Forgive me. ... you need to forgive yourself."

When 30 minutes of the book are to go, a hospital bed is delivered to the house. She thinks about writing letters for Iris to open on significant birthdays, then decides she’d prefer Iris to write letters to her.

Her ashes were a pound lighter than her birthweight. Iris carries them around like a newborn. She decides to spread the ashes as far as they can go.

Burn girl and the twins are mentioned several times. I'm not convinced that they need to be.

There are many notable phrases - e.g.

• "and now all the children are loose in my woods"
• "Like fruitflies, taste buds only live 14 days" (when she wants to get rid of a man's taste)
• "sometimes people depend on the distance between moment and meaning"
• "infected nodes shiver under armpits the way beasts wait under the bridges"
• [a letter thrown into a river] "bleeding out from its wounds"

Other reviews

• Caleb Klaces (The disorienting experience of this technique brings to mind Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, another novel that stretches conventional language to address terminal illness. Whereas McBride’s prose is fragmented in a way that is consistent throughout, creating a distinctive stream-of-consciousness style, Mortimer’s writing is restlessly inventive. It includes different fonts, stanzas, visual arrangements, lists and playful definitions, ... Should the disembodied voice be interpreted as a personification of cancer? ... The publisher’s press release includes a letter from Mortimer herself, outlining the book’s origins in personal experience and expressing a hope that readers will be “gentle”)
• Lillian Pearce (Mortimer’s most captivating choice was to have the cancer love Lia as opposed to hating her. This decision was only undermined by its needless frequency and sloppy finish; near the end of the novel, the cancer’s narration felt more intrusive than purposeful, more bizarre than enthralling ... Another failure of “Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies” is the language Mortimer employs to discuss disease. It was disappointing to see Mortimer use the same “military” language often attached to discussions of cancer ... Mortimer reiterates the misconception that cancer is something to be ashamed of, that illness makes you less. Her presentation of cancer is unoriginal and unremarkable. Though this book is noted as a “meditation on illness and death,” it adds nothing new to the genre nor the discourse. ... The real tension of “Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies” is not embodied by the disease, but rather by the relationship between Lia and her mother. ... Mortimer wants us to accept an abrupt reunion seemingly founded on death and disease without ever providing an explanation for their newfound proximity. ... its regurgitation of lackluster representations of disease and its failure to effectively resolve significant character tensions)

"The latecomer" by Jean Hanff Korelitz

An audio book

Salo Oppenheimer is rich. When younger he was driving when an accident killed his friend and injured another passenger, Stella. He marries Johanna. They're nominally Jews. They have expensive treatment to have children because she wants them. He collects art. He gets a warehouse to store it in. They have triplets. The girl, Sally is the PoV. Salo remains rather distant. The children learn from their mother about his european travels as a student. There's a description of the kids' time in school and college, their mother managing things - the triplets don't get on with each other. There'a a lot of compare/constrast. Sally thinks the kids' personalities changed little since birth. She fears she's a lesbian. At an art gallery she fancies a woman who turns out to be Stella - a black who her father has been sleeping with for years. Johanna discovers that Stella has a child by Salo. She gets her remaining fertilising egg out of storage and hires a womb.

Harrison goes to a study commune (all boys) for auto-didacts, where they do farmwork. His hero autodidact Eli is there. To Harrison's surprise he's black. Eli accuses a fellow student of copying his work. He invites Harrison to a special mini-conference.

Sally's room-mate at Cornell is Rochelle. Sally has few friends. Lewyn goes to the same college but they don't tell friends about each other. His room-mate Jonas is a Mormon. They go to each other's rituals. Lewyn and Rochelle become friends. It dawns on Lewyn who her room-mate is but he keeps quiet about the connection even when he shares the room with Rochelle when Sally moves out to stay in a furniture trader's house. Rochelle tells him that she thinks Sally is a lesbian. When Phoebe (the triplets' sister) is 14 months and the triplets reach their 19th birthday, Salo realises he's in love with Stella, but still doesn't realise that others know about his affair. Rochelle's invited to the family house, still unaware that her boyfriend is Sally's brother. Not only is this embarrassingly revealed (Rochelle breaks with Lewyn), but Harrison blurts out that Sally's a lesbian. Salo dies on a 9/11 flight the next day. on the way to Stella.

In Part III Phoebe, 17, is the first person narrator. Harrison (Harvard) runs the family company, appears on TV and his best friend is Eli who visits the white house (a black republican). Sally still clears houses. Lewyn lives at home. She learns she was IVF-conceived at the same time as her siblings. This makes her want to be closer to her siblings. He tells her about his temporary conversion to Mormonism. Sally confesses for the first time that she has a girlfriend and tells Phoebe that their father had a mistress.

She discovers that she knows her half-brother already. Efron. She and Lewyn meet Stella. Efron writes an article about Eli - he'd been born white but made himself black. Harrison has never met Efron. He now respects him. Phoebe meets Rochelle - a divorced lawyer - who needs her cluttered mother's house cleared. Sally does it. She and Lewyn get together. Phoebe decides to go to the now dual-gender college that Harrison went to.

At the end Johanna tells Phoebe she's gay. She regrets not telling them about the Salo's accident - it would have made Salo's behaviour more acceptable. Johanna tells Phoebe that she's far from an after-thought. She's the one reviving the family - a phoenix.

The plot's tidy, with happy endings and discussible themes. Some sections - the watermelon section and the religious monologues for example - go on too long for me. Perhaps this is because it's an audio book. With a paper book I'd have sprinted through those passages.

Other reviews

• Allegra Goodman (Korelitz’s plot points are in some ways old-fashioned — a tragic accident, an extramarital affair, a secret bequest, a mysterious letter — and in some ways new: “therapy goals,” cancel culture ... Its protagonists reinvent themselves with astonishing ingenuity.)
• goodreads
• Meredith Maran (Thoroughly modern social satire! Tonally spot-on chapter titles, like “Summer Lovers: In which Sally Oppenheimer discovers her brother’s snakeliness, and contemplates the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life.” Soaring sentences like this one, in which Triplet Harrison describes his life to date. “Eighteen years of being coddled, overscheduled, and overseen, paid attention to in all the worst ways (and none of the ways that mattered), housed and clothed and fed and amused in a manner commensurate with his family’s endemic wealth.”)
• kirkusreviews (A bit slow in the middle section but on balance, a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations)

"The Family Remains" by Lisa Jewell

An audio book

Samuel (detective) is called to the mudflats of the Thames. Body parts are in a binliner - 20+ years old, but recently dumped.

Rachel Rimmer's husband is found dead in his French house. The wife's unconcerned.

Henry Lamb, 42, has a sister, Lucy, staying with him, who was pregnant at 13 because of who moved into their house at the time. Their parents are dead - suicides. They've recently inherited millions. Finn had got her pregnant. Henry fancied him and goes looking for him in Chicago. Clemency/Libby is Finn's younger sister. Henry discovers that Finn is bisexual. Libby (Serenity) is Finn's daughter. Birdy brought in David (40+) in the house where she was a gues - a healer - her lover. David brings his wife (Sally) and 2 kids (Finn and Clemency). He rips the family off. She grooms Lucy to have sex with him because she can't have a child herself.

Rachel met Michael in the US. They met later in London. He's rich, and several years older than her. She makes jewelery. On their honeymoon she shows an interest in BDSM that puts him off sex. She wants a divorce. She goes to French to find his first wife (Lucy?) and his son. Lucy is poor, and has another child - a daughter.

Rachel's sensible father is sent porn pictures of Rachel and pays £700,000 to the blackmail (unlikely!). Rachel goes over to France again to sort things out. She finds him dead. She sees Lucy cleaning up.

The dead person was Bridget (Birdy), a pop star. Samuel traces her back to the Lamb house. Several of the people from that time have disappeared. As he points out, nearly all of them have changed their name. The bones were thrown in the Thames roughly when Libby was 25 and inherited the house which she quickly sold, giving lots of the money to 2 people.

The police interview Justin - Bridget's boyfriend at the time. He knew she was bad and left the big house.

Lucy takes her 2 kids to Chicago, looking for Henry who once chained Finn to a radiator. Lucy has done some bad things.

The police interview Lucy and Henry from London.

In Justin's suicide letter we learn that Birdy died by accident when Justin and Henry tussled. Henry knows it's untrue - it was Henry alone who's to blame. Henry's touched that Justin took the blame. Henry had been fixated by Finn. He'd had surgery to be more like him. He sometimes used his name. Now he thinks his old self may have been ok.

Later, Rachel goes over to Lucy telling her the the case is closed, but she knows. Rachel's father got his money back.

Too many names for me. Also some parts of the book strain credibility - the need to continue from the earlier book dictates the plot which in turn take precedence over character.

We learn that Henry had found Finn after all. A few months later, Finn visits his kids.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• Mary Cadden
• Kathy Reel