In a small middle-class community in London, Scarlet, a bored housewife who thinks she’s going mad, sets off suspicions about a neighbor who hasn’t been seen for a while. Has American-born Barbs disappeared under suspicious circumstances? Brian, Scarlet’s self-absorbed advertising-executive husband, is dismissive, as usual. But her idle neighbor, Constance, a woman with a gypsy heritage and criminal relatives, helps feed the suspicions. Camille, Scarlet’s petulant teenage daughter, and her friends join in with the adults in bored speculation about Barbs’ whereabouts. The speculation distracts them from ordinary life: marital discord, sexual infidelity, teenage rebellion, conflicts between mother and daughter. But none of them takes any official action, even when a blood-stained body is removed from the canal. Their casual fanning of the mystery, including theories about who might have harmed Barbs and why, provides an opportunity to dissect the personality of the missing woman, her social consciousness, and her relationship with others. In so doing, they reflect, momentarily, on their own personality flaws. Vanessa Bush
From Kirkus Reviews
The latest from Britisher Ellis may not have quite the depth (though its close) of The 27th Kingdom (1999), but its got all the same bite, wit, and deft, intellectual allure. In a London neighborhood where (again) the well-off and derelict reside cheek by jowl, lives a family of three, consisting of Brian (third marriage); wife Scarlet (second marriage, and so depressed that, alone in the house, she found that she wished she was dead); and teenaged Camille, daughter of Scarlet, hater of stepfather Brian (hes insensitive, he works in advertising), sneaker of margaritas, skipper of school. Of equal importance is next-door neighbor Constance, born and raised in the old neighborhood, quick-witted and self-educated, one who still dealt in stolen goods when she got the chance and whose numerous brothers (there had been ten siblings all together), although now grown and away from home, continue to lurk with genuine menace at the edges of the criminal life. Could these scary brothers, in fact, have something to do with the disappearance of neighbor Barbsthe privately disliked but publically praised feminist, social activist, and sleeper with the husbands and boyfriends of otherswhose house has been empty for days and who didnt even feed Constances cats as shed agreed to when Constance was recently away? Barbs (as Camille discovers) has even left behind her cosmetics bag, an ominous sign in light of the areas high crime rateor in light of the unidentified female body dragged a few days earlier from the canal. As always, Ellis hints at enormities through glances at the smallest weaknesses and mundanities of her characters lives; and here again, as the despairing Scarlet has a dinner party, as Connie wonders whether to go to the police, and as Camille teeters on the edge of the future, life itself does little more thanhedge its bet. Smart, intelligent, near-perfect fiction: always amusing, deeper than it looks.– Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
…a witty dissection of middle-class English mores brimming with extra-dry aperçus that deftly illuminate the restiveness only partly concealed behind those freshly cut hedges. — The New York Times Book Review, Sarah Ferguson
About the Author
Alice Thomas Ellis was been short-listed for the Booker prize for this novel. She is the author of A Welsh Childhood (autobiography), Fairy Tales and several other novels including The Summerhouse Trilogy, made into a movie starring Jeanne Moreau and Joan Plowright.
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