A Scottish-Canadian Blethering On About Books

I found this cleverly suggestive - we are definitely left with some serious questions at the end about whether our first-person protagonist indulged in murderous revenge - and, of course, the subject matter's very difficult to read, since it's predicated on sexual and psychological torture, even though Walters spares us a vivid description; we get it piecemeal as Connie Burns manages to persuade herself to confide in her worried friends and colleagues.

The strong suggestion is that it's in the solution of a local villainy (a greedy female relative cruelly drives an elderly woman past the edge of incompetence; there's a family history involving an illegitimate child) that enables Ms Burns, an investigative journalist, to regain her courage and self-respect enough to recover from her ordeal at the hands of a psychosexual sadist who uses the cover of terrorist-plagued warzones to inflict his own personal horrors. Connie's ally is another woman, equally repressed though for different reasons, named Jess, a highly self-sufficient woman from a local farm who turns out to be far more decent-hearted than the local gossips believe.

While I read through this novel quickly enough, and with interest, I doubt if I'll remember much of it in a few months.