Tangled Web UK Review February 2007
Ice Trap by
Kitty Sewell
pbk out February 07
(Pocket Books)
at £6.99
A remarkably well-written and well-plotted first novel, which was short-
listed for the CWA New Blood Award and the Wales Book of the Year
Award – and won the BBC Wales Reader's Prize.
More of a straight novel than a crime book in the usual homicidal sense,
it was first published by Honno, an Aberystwyth-based cooperative of
Welsh women writers, then taken up for re-publication by Simon and
Schuster.
A highly-imaginative and unique story-line is set mainly in the frozen
north of the NW Territories in Canada and partly in Cardiff, where the
main character, Dafydd Woodruff is a consultant surgeon. The action
swings between 2006 and 1992, as Woodruff had spent a year in remote
Moose Creek as a locum doctor, getting away from a professional disaster
in South Wales. His time there is eventful, as he becomes embroiled with
a domineering, psychopathic head nurse and with a drunken, drug-
addicted fellow doctor. He returned home, marries and all is fairly well
for a decade, except that his childless union is steadily going downhill.
Its demise is accelerated by a letter he gets from the daughter of the grim
nurse, who says she and her twin brother are his children! He genuinely
claims that he never had sex with the woman, but eventually a DNA test
proves that they must have been his. He goes back to Moose Creek and
reluctantly begins to feel paternal emotions for them, though the mother
is bleeding him financially. From then on, things get tough and
complicated, but very intriguing.
Apart from the excellent story-line, the book is memorable for its
descriptive power of the frozen Arctic regions and the scruffy towns that
lie up there, baking hot and midge-ridden in high summer and fatally cold
in winter. Written during a Creative Writing course in Swansea, the
author writes from first-hand experience of the region and the result is
well worth reading.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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