Jane R. Goodall

The book starts promisingly in 1967 as a teenage girl, Nell Adams, discovers she’s been sitting in a train carriage with a dead body for her entire trip. Fast forward four years and Nell returns to London after overcoming her nightmares about her train carriage experience to take up a place at university. At the same time a series of grizzly murders starts in the city and is being investigated by a team of London's finest.

All-in-all it’s a pretty good yarn although there are one too many coincidences to make it truly believable and I found it too long (nearly 500 pages, more than a few of which could have been edited out). It also seemed to me as if every stereotype about the early 70's was stuffed into the one story which stretched the bounds of credibility for me.

However, the characters are terrific. In Nell, Goodall has created a really credible character of a person living in continuous fear of something she can’t quite name. It’s quite a brilliant depiction. Briony Williams, the newly promoted plain clothes police Detective, is not nearly as likeable (she spends too much time being paranoid about the blokes all being out to get her for me) but is an equally interesting person. Unfortunately the baddie isn’t really much of a presence at all which is disappointing as I's have liked to see what Goodall made of the darker side of human nature.

… (mere)