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Laura Wilson is a gifted writer who brings the horror of the 1940 bombing of London to life in a wonderfully dark and disturbing story told by three characters: a man who is driven to murder women, a prostitute who is torn between her anxiety about being his next victim and her need to earn enough money to keep her child from going hungry, and a naïve young office worker who is so flattered by the attentions of a handsome young airman and so eager to have a bit of excitement in her life that she reads all the signs wrong. The psychological state of each of these three characters is brought out in their own voices, each distinct and revealing. Lucy, who lives at home, works as a secretary, and is bored with her boyfriend, has a chirpy way of keeping her upper lip stiff, though she is impatient with her mother, who is slowly losing her mind as the bombs rain down. Rene has come to terms with the work she has to do because there's no other work to be had and her sister, who is raising Rene's child, has an abusive husband and very little money to make ends meet. And then there's Jim, the handsome airman who is awkward with his peers, who is visibly coming apart thanks to the stress of facing death every time he's ordered to take to the skies, and who (we come to realize) was deranged long before he put on the uniform. Though there's not much doubt about Jim's propensity for violence, the tension is in watching these characters' paths cross, knowing that one of the women is likely to become a victim of the killer – Rene, because her work makes her vulnerable, or Lucy because she is so good at misleading herself. This is not anything like the usual serial killer story in which good and evil are locked in struggle, with women's bodies used to keep score. In Wilson's wartime London, mindless violence is in the air like the dust of bombed houses. We have a tendency to romanticize the Blitz and Battle of Britain as a time when civilization stared barbarity in the eye and barbarity blinked. Yet as Wilson brings that moment back to life, it is nobody's finest hour. She is so good at evoking the everyday experience of the raids and the fear felt by airmen who know the odds against them that we begin to think the violence we do to one another in war is no more honorable or ennobling than what happens when angry, crazed men seek release by killing women. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, December 2011
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