Lost Girls by
Andrew Pyper
hbk out April 00
Published by Macmillan
Bartholomew Christian Crane is a criminal defence lawyer, and a self-confessed aficionado of the seedy, with a substantial cocaine habit. When he takes on a case his intention is only to win; the truth is irrelevant. He comes across as an arrogant and unprincipled character.
Barth is sent to a lakeside town in northern Ontario to defend a schoolteacher accused of murdering two fourteen year old girls. He feels sure of victory, after all the girl's bodies have never been found and there
is little evidence against the man. He checks into the honeymoon suite of the run-down Empire Hotel but soon finds his optimism is misplaced. The claustrophobic small town atmosphere, the bizarre behaviour of his client and a spiral of strange events unnerve and disturb him. His increased reliance on drugs only adds to his paranoia. His sojourn descends into nightmare. Lost Girls is an excellent first novel; part thriller, part ghost story but always original in style and compulsive reading. Pyper evokes a wonderful sense of brooding menace in the inhospitable Canadian north country and paints a convincing picture of a man whose confidence, sense of identity and grip on reality are stripped away forcing him to confront the fears of the present and the ghosts of the past.
(MEN 19.5.2000)
(
Cath Staincliffe
- Author of the highly acclaimed Sal Kilkenny Mysteries set on the Mean Streets of Manchester)
