OK well trying to calm down and remember that this is a book blog and not Random Jottings of a Grandmother and back to a stonking mystery I read last week, sent to me by Constable.
Never heard of Diane Janes, I admit though I gather from the press release which came with the book that she is the author of non-fiction titles, and this is her first foray into fiction and murder . Delighted to say that I thoroughly enjoyed The Pull of the Moon, found it pacy and well written and read it through without stopping one cold afternoon last week.
It is the summer of 1972, one of those long hot lazy summers that we all remember when we look back on our youth, and Kate Mayfield has escaped from her stifling home life and is spending several weeks with her boyfriend Danny and his friend Simon, in an isolated house in the country. There is a heavy, hazy feel about the setting and the reader feels the langour and the heat and the happy drifting existence that the three are living. Then along comes Trudie, a mysterious runaway who joins them and balances and emotions shift and a feeling of unease and foreboding enters the narrative and we know, with her arrival, that something is going to happen....
The story of this time is told in flashback by the now middle-aged Kate. We learn that she lives alone, that Danny is dead and that there has been a dreadful happening during those sun filled weeks which she is keeping secret. Then out of the blue she receives a letter from Danny's mother, dying in a hospice who wishes to speak to Kate about her son's death with which she has never come to terms. Reluctantly, Kate goes to see her but spares her the truth so that she has a peaceful death.
"It doesn't feel wrong for me to be sitting here - although perhaps it should. Am I not the person who destroyed her beloved son? And yet in doing so I have preserved her illusions and her dreams - perhaps that counts for something"
Kate has kept this secret, and another, all her adult life and the revelations at the end took me totally by surprise and I like it when a book does that and you sit there and think Blimey.
I was most impressed by The Pull of the Moon and it was not till I had finished reading that I recognised the feeling of impending dread that permeates this book and why it felt familiar to me. This is a story very much in the mould of A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine (aka Ruth Rendell) which I read some 20 years ago, with the same kind of setting, disparate characters gathered together in one place and then bound for ever afterwards, with disastrous consequences, by a death. I have always felt that was Barbara Vine's best book so to compare with Diane Janes with her is a compliment. I mean it as such and hope that she accepts it so.
Due to be published in April and I suggest you put it on your wish list. Recommended.
