Night Visit by
Priscilla Masters
pbk out January 00
(Allison Busby)
at £5.99
In a page-long prelude a six-year old girl called Melanie Toadstool leaves the home of her grandparents early one morning and runs across the grass towards the trees. This is followed by a newspaper cutting, dated ten years later, of an attack on a doctor in an isolated country lane.
The doctor's name is Harriet Lamont. A year before the attack she had attended Melanie's grandfather, Reuben, who is dying of cancer. On this last visit he asks for her help, but the help is not for himself. He wants the doctor to find out what happened to Melanie whose body has not been found. He was himself a suspect at the time of her disappearance.
Harriet, the narrator, has a full enough life without this added burden. Her marriage has ended and she has a nine-year old daughter, Rosie, to bring up as well as hold down a partnership in a busy practice. But she becomes obsessed by the image of a little girl in a red dress wandering lost in the wood and suspects that one of her patients, Anthony Partridge, may be involved. He is a pudgy middle-aged bachelor who lives in a squalid cottage with his elderly mother. He insists on visiting Harriet once a month to be tested for his blood pressure, but he gradually becomes an intimidating presence in her life. He was questioned by the police during the Melanie investigation and is now working at the school where Harriet's daughter is a pupil, Harriet suspects that he is a child abuser who has designs on her daughter, She tries to alert the school and the police to the possible danger, but her fears are disregarded.
In this novel Priscilla Masters has deserted DI Joanna Piercy for GP Harriet Lament. Harriet is a very convincing character and absorbs the reader in the detail of her everyday life, in her relations with her colleagues, Duncan and Neil, and her patients, particularly the difficult ones, Pritchard and Danny the drug addict, and her ex-husband, the philandering Robin, and above all her daughter, Rosie, whose safety is her prime concern. The author writes very well and the story of Harriet Lament compels the reader to keep turning the pages to the very end. We shall not miss Joanna Piercy if all non-Piercy books are as good as this.
Night Visit by
Priscilla Masters