Jennifer Palmer has read crime fiction since her teenage years & enjoys reviewing within the many sub-genres that now exist; as a historian who lectures on real life historical mysteries she particularly appreciates historical cime fiction.
In a bleak Norfolk prison a
psychologist struggles to explain an obsessional belief in a menacing female
ghostly presence affecting some prisoners with dire results.
HMP Halvergate is a prison in Norfolk
and the protagonist here is the newly appointed prison psychologist, Dr Janet
Palmer. The 1950s buildings are drab indeed with a palpable feeling engendered
of despair and fear. A prison provides that beloved setting of crime fiction, a
closed community. Janet can, of course, leave the goal after her working days
but the despair and fear go with her to her rented, shabby, unattractive house
in the nearby village. The Gothic atmosphere of the prison is compounded by the
attitudes of the prisoners she treats (all sex offenders) and the somewhat
inexplicable hostility of the prison staff towards her. She has her own demons
to fight, relating to her sister's death (does any protagonist in crime fiction
ever have a happy domestic life?).
There have been several inmates before
her arrival who have killed themselves and there are stories amongst the
inmates of a spirit of vengeance that attacks individuals and becomes an
obsessive presence. The previous prison psychologist was troubled by the idea
of a female Fury pursuing guilty men.
Janet struggles on, virtually alone,
in the overwhelming task of making sense of the swirling emotions within and
outside the prison. Eventually she succeeds in gaining more understanding of
the causes of the deaths though she is hampered by her own feelings and experiences.
The ghostly presence that pervades the
book makes rational explanations hard to discover. Janet's search for the
causes of the events that unfold is intelligent and productive even if the
atmosphere is highly charged.
I am not a fan of ghost stories and I
preferred the logical parts of this tale with its superb evocation of a bleakly
atmospheric Norfolk and the work of a psychologist with sex offenders in a
prison.
Since Janet didn't eat a
decent meal throughout the book I wondered if the angst she felt had a purely
physical origin!
