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RATING: |
Date of Release: April 2002 |
Publisher: Pan Macmillan |
Review Source: |
Ruth Gemmill grows worried when her younger brother Alex stops returning her calls. He has been living in the small village of Greenwell and working as a teacher, so Ruth travels there to find out what has happened to him. She meets an intimidating wall of silence from the locals, and the growing unease the town generates in her is worsened by the blank non co-operation of the police. The questions accumulate, but the most pressing is who is the "grey man" Alex's pupils saw him with just before he vanished. As Ruth's fears escalate, the tension is ratcheted up by the appearance of a brutal ex-lover she knew in London, a man who caused her years of pain. And as Ruth descends into this nightmare of mystery and suspicion, she comes ever closer to some terrifying revelations.
There are familiar elements here, of course, not least the suspicious, close-mouthed townsfolk. But Morris adroitly reinvents such tricks of the suspense novelist's trade and delivers a brilliantly orchestrated narrative. Morris is particularly successful in the first-person narrative chosen for the increasingly concerned Ruth: her growing psychological tension is perfectly matched by the ever-darkening trajectory of the mystery.
