Deathwatch [Paperback]

Nicola Morgan's novel "Deathwatch" is billed as "a chilling and skilful psychological thriller", aimed at the young adult market. It does quite a good job of living up to this billing and should appeal to most within its target audience, as well as to some older readers. Up to a point...

Fifteen year-old Cat McPherson has a passion for sport, and a talent for the biathlon. She lives in a fairly respectable area of Edinburgh, the daughter of professional parents and sister to a younger (and therefore necessarily irritating) brother, Angus. She is good, although not annoyingly so, at her school-work. And pretty, although she does not consider herself as such. She practices hard for her sport, which is just about her only real interest in life, although she spends long hours in her bedroom on her laptop, talking with her on-line friends and maintaining her social networking profile page while her parents think she is doing her homework. And she most definitely does NOT like spiders or creepy-crawlies of any kind. In short, Cat McPherson is a typical and, she thinks, an entirely ordinary and unremarkable teenage girl. Unbeknown to her, however, there is one thing which marks her out as different and is set to make her life very different. She has a stalker; and a particularly nasty one, at that.

Nicola Morgan canvassed feedback and opinions from a number of teenage school-girls during the development of this novel, so it is not surprising that the story-line stays highly focused on issues affecting today's teenagers, especially girls: parental pressure to succeed, dangers of the internet, relationships with boys and many other aspects of growing up in the modern world. I fear that she has over egged this particular cake somewhat, trying just a little too hard to include all the sources of teenage angst and Cat's responses to them. This aside, however, the thriller aspect of the story is well handled, with the tension building steadily, while the reader is kept guessing pretty much until the end as to just who the villain of the piece might be. The ending when it comes, though, is something of an anti-climax.

Overall, I could not help feeling that the book lacked any real sophistication despite its attempts to lift itself out of the ordinary. There are times when the concentration of Big Issues rather crowds out the main story, leaving the reader to flag somewhat from time to time; the really exciting parts, by comparison, end up feeling rushed and over-paced. The book is not bad, by any means, but I can't help feeling it could have been better.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  3.0 out of 5 stars