From Publishers Weekly
A shared, violent past haunts former patients of an Edinburgh adolescent psych unit in BBC reporter Walker's uneven debut thriller. In 2004, Innes Haldane, a graduate of the Unit, learns of the death of one of her former Unit friends, Isabella "Abby" Velasco. Flashing between the present and 1977, when the teens were institutionalized together, Walker shows her characters as deeply troubled kids and as variously disturbed adults plagued by guilty memories of a camping trip gone wrong. What happened back then? And does it spell death today? When Innes leaves her London job to look into Abby's alleged suicide, she learns that just before her death, Abby had started seeing Danny Rintoul, an accused rapist and former occupant of the Unit. Danny, she quickly learns, is another suspected suicide. Meanwhile, heartless stockbroker Alex Baxendale, another Unit grad, resists uncovering long-buried secrets, and Dr. Simon Caldwell, also a former Unit resident, is looking for clues to his daughter's kidnapping. Walker gives her characters so many secrets—and keeps hinting around at that old, big one—that it can be exhausting. She characterizes and summarizes hurriedly, rushing from one revelation to the next, and the psychology is often shallow (bad behavior is blamed on bad parents and bad therapy; redemption is found in confession and good therapy). But the ending offers many grisly surprises.
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From Booklist
Seven teenagers institutionalized in "the Unit," representing a textbook range of emotional afflictions, are taken on an Outward Bound-style weekend. The disappearance of four members of the group during a night hike--followed by some seriously paranoid behavior upon their return--forms the crux of this psychological thriller where the burning question is not so much whodunit but "What'd they do?" Walker, a British journalist, veils a generic plotline with a jittery, third-person narrative that incorporates lengthy flashbacks, newspaper clippings, letters, and excerpts from therapists' logbooks. Most of the novel, though, is set in a period two decades after the fateful moonlit eve, when the former inpatients begin dropping like flies and the surviving characters' lives portentously converge. When the revelation finally arrives, it's so horrific that many readers, even those relatively inured to suspense-novel depravity, will be left incredulous. Nonetheless, like Donna Tartt in
The Secret History (1992)--but think loony bin, not Ivory Tower--this first novelist peels back the layers with confidence and polish. Fans of head-shrinking spine tinglers will be putty in her hands.
Jennifer MattsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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