There are two dead people from the start. One, Angel Joyce, kills herself after a couple of days of cross-examination by a horrible barrister. That barrister, Marianne Shearer, then kills herself shortly after the trial collapses. This latter death leads to two questions: why did she do it, and where did she leave her will and valuables? There’s a good team and a bad team trying to solve these questions. Good team: Thomas Noble, lawyer, ostensibly acting on behalf of Marianne’s brother; Peter Friel, also lawyer, a sort of factotum and bagman for Noble; Henrietta Joyce, sister of Angel Joyce, expert clothes-preserver. Bad team: Rick Boyd, a charming psychopath whose collapsed trial precipitates the events; Frank Shearer, Marianne’s brother, manipulated by Boyd into acting against his own interests.
OK, I’ve just about managed to describe a framework for what’s going on here, but honestly, it’s very hard to know what Fyfield is actually trying to do here. None of her characters, good or bad, seem to have much of a plan for solving these questions; they bumble about rather aimlessly as the solutions emerge autonomously, Marianne’s instructions from beyond the grave causing telling packages to arrive on doorsteps. There’s a twist of sorts, but telegraphed so far in advance and so often that it doesn’t really count. There’s a lot of stuff about Marianne’s wonderful wardrobe, most of which turns out to be, ahem, immaterial.
So perhaps Fyfield isn’t trying to write a plot-driven thriller. A psychological one, then? Maybe. Would help if any of these many characters were psychologically convincing. But their motivations and reasons remain pretty obscure. This is especially so with Boyd. He’s got off, he’s got away with it, why is he hanging round trying to get hold of Marianne’s stuff? Other characters keep offering unconvincing explanations for this, but Boyd himself is inscrutable. The other characters also keep telling each other how charming and seductive and manipulative he is, but none of this is plain when he’s actually in view. And that matters, because if this is meant to be a psychological thriller, it’s the psychology of the main bad guy that needs to be sharp.
What I’ve just described is an author repeatedly forced to tell their reader things, often through wooden dialogue, because they’re not capable of showing those things. That’s a bad sign, and one which points towards the book’s fundamental flaw: it’s just not very well written. I realised after struggling through the first 50 pages or so that I was constantly being derailed by the syntax of the sentences. Very rarely outright mangled, but often stodgy, meandering, uncertain of how to land, sometimes festooned with fussy commas, sometimes oddly devoid of them. It’s second-draft writing, in need of a good edit by someone who knows how make prose flow.
The trouble is, once you notice the writing is bad, you notice it more and more: clunking repetition, peculiar word choice, redundancy (“branded, air-conditioned Mercedes and BMWs”), all of it. And if there’s not much of a plot to keep you moving forward, the read becomes very boggy indeed.