A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder by Gay Marris – Review

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A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder by Gay Marris – Review (2)

By Sarah Morgan

The year 1968 was full of extraordinary events in Britain.

Enoch Powell made his notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Grosvenor Square left 91 police injured and resulted in 200 arrests, abortion was legalised, the country’s first heart transplant took place and the M1 was completed.

But none of these headline-grabbing moments seem to have touched the lives of the residents of suburban London’s Atbara Avenue, who are at the centre of Gay Marris’s debut novel.

Instead, what appears to be of far more importance are good, old-fashioned manners, politeness, and being considerate while also minding one’s own business. It’s the kind of place I’m not sure ever really existed, except for through rose-tinted glasses, but it nevertheless provides a strong background for a series of intertwined stories.

A Curtain Twitcher's Book of Murder by Gay Marris – Review (1)“Laced with dark humour”

Marris, a retired research scientist living in York, hasn’t opted for a standard, straightforward tale as her debut. Instead, she’s crafted several shorter tales that all come together rather neatly at the end. It’s quite ingenious, and is a format other first-time writers may adopt in the future – it must surely be a lot less daunting to pen a selection of smaller narratives than a single lengthy one.

Behind every net curtain on the avenue lurks somebody with a secret, from the widow who lives in mutual disrespect with her grown-up, put-upon daughter, to the troubled boy trying to recover from a serious accident and the twins desperate to break their bond.

They all get up to mischief and mayhem under the nose of the local vicar’s well-meaning yet utterly gullible wife who, despite being a bit of a busybody, seems to miss all the signs of her neighbours’ wrongdoings while hiding a dark incident from her own past.

If you like your crime fiction laced with dark humour and poignancy, Marris’s book will leave you feeling satisfied. Told with wit and skill, it will, however, once having been fully digested, leave you with an appetite for more – I for one can’t wait to see what she does next.

‘A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder’ by Gay Marris us published by Bedford Square

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