Oh, you do?
WELL, here we go.
The book is the fantastically titled The Corpse Now Arriving by Margaret Hinxman. The front cover features an obviously bleached plastic laboratory skellington clutching a British Rail ticket from [xXx] to London Victoria (via Penge). It’s in those details that idiots like me thrive, and the book was only 50p, so I had to buy it. But oh my word, I have a high tolerance for thin plots but this is ridiculous. The protagonist is a 30something freelance journalist, and one can’t help but think this is an entirely shameless grabbing for positive reviews from harassed hacks desperate for some empathy. Her tedious life and depressing ‘marital trauma’ sideline makes me want to throw a cup of boiling Virgin Rail overbrewed tea in her ‘well dressed Fleet Street style’ face. “We always argued like this, when we were together, she thought, regretfully. Richard glowered at her. Oh, if it wasn’t for her damned pride, she thought”. Unfortunately I can’t quite bring myself to fully channel such dreadful prose but believe you me, consider yourself lucky.
And dear god, the plot, the plot is so thin that wafer thin HAM would be better at stopping a bullet than this flimsy excuse of a narrative. I know who murdered Maisie Butler, but most importantly, I find that I don’t give a tinkers toss, and in the final grappling between Our Heroine and the murderer, I’m voting for HIM just to shut the darned woman from carping on fit to explode. In more rational times, Hinxman would be be firmly restricted to the odd nutloop letter of complaint in the Metro, but obviously things were different back in the 80s.
I blame Thatcher.