Kerry Hood was in publishing for many years, working in publicity for several publishers over the time, working on fiction and non-fiction titles. Crime and thrillers have always been those she turns to first, however, and the ones she reads late at night or when she has a quiet moment.
Atbara Avenue is one street of many in a city – alike in so many ways to so many other 1960s streets. And yet … and yet …behind the front doors of rather a lot of the houses in Atbara Avenue there are secrets, and quite shocking misdeeds. Murder; not to put too fine a point on it.
This glorious debut novel is set in many houses on one street in 1968. Atbara Avenue, it is, which has probably done nothing to attract its householders. It hasn’t hung out a sign reading ‘Murderers, plotters and revengers must live here’ or anything, but as the author Gay Marris tells it, this is the way of it.
Unsuspecting readers taking a peek behind the closed doors of, say, Number 17, Number 34, Number 3 or indeed The Vicarage, might expect to find teapots with cozies, Liquid Gumption and Formica kitchen table-tops with kindly, charitable householders using them. Instead, they would find wickedness, scheming, vengeance and no shortage of intended, and unintended murder.
Author Gay Marris has woven mayhem into the fabric of the street. With a wonderfully deft touch, she has brought to life several of the inhabitants, their relations, visitors and lodgers, who all in their own ways have contributed to the seamier side of this seemingly innocent fabric. She cleverly runs a couple of threads through the narrative that link each separate story to the neighbouring ones – even the most inhospitable of actual neighbours link in with the action at one stage or another. Age doesn’t come into it. There is a 12-year-old with a strange friend, a daughter at odds with her mother, a wife who thinks a visitor is after information about a particular baby, a conman attempting theft from a fading glamour-puss, and much more.
As the author writes, ‘Ask anyone how well they know their neighbours, and they will answer, ‘Well.’ … ‘The truth is, however, these people hardly know each other at all.’ Which only goes to serve us readers with the most delicious of entertainment.
This really is the most beguiling of novels, and haste on the next novel from author Gay Marris.
