Cath, now a keen photographer with a project to document “murder houses”, strikes up an uneasy friendship with the woman who owns the Craigies’ old home. Cath was a teenager on the Isle of Bute when her best friend Shirley Craigie was murdered, together with her mother and baby brother the killer, Shirley’s father John, died in a car crash shortly afterwards.
Perceptive and compassionate, this is a tale of human devastation, superbly told.Īlthough she is not the culprit, protagonist Cath also returns to the crime scene in Nina Allan’s latest novel, The Good Neighbours (Riverrun, £16.99). Consumed by guilt and fearing Molly will be taken away from her, she revisits the scene of her crime. Now a parent herself, Julia adores four-year-old Molly, but mothering doesn’t come easily to someone who has never been mothered. The narrative is split between the child Chrissie, whose terrible secret makes her feel, for once, important, as the police try to figure out who strangled two-year-old Steven and the adult woman, renamed Julia and released after a long spell in a secure unit. She acts up at school, bullies her friends, and makes heartbreaking attempts to reframe the mistreatment as care. Neglected by her mother, with a catastrophically indifferent father, Chrissie is permanently on the scrounge: for food, for affection, for someone just to notice that she exists. From the first line, the eight-year-old narrator leaves us in no doubt that she, too, is a murderer. There are echoes of the real 11-year-old killer Mary Bell in Nancy Tucker’s remarkably assured debut novel, The First Day of Spring (Hutchinson, £12.99).
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