Book Review: Frozen

Reviewed By: A. Rolfingsmeier

[1 stars]

Frozen Amazon US PB Amazon UK PB Amazon UK HC Amazon Canada PB
Richard Burke
Class/Genre: Mystery Amateur Sleuth
Fiction - suspense, Orion, 2003, 310 pages

“Zoetrope”: “an optical toy - a cylinder with a series of pictures on the inner surface which give an impression of continuous motion when seen through slits with the cylinder rotating.”

Verity Hadley, a nascent London fashion designer, is found at the foot of a popular suicide site on the unfashionable Sussex coast, alive in name only. Her long-time friend, and longing-to-be-lover, Harry Waddell fumes in a London bar because she’s stood him up.

Harry flatly refuses to believe the vibrant Verity threw herself off the Beachy Head cliff. He knows her too well to believe that. Or does he? In trying to understand what happened to Verity, he suffers shock after emotional shock. He learns of a scroungy Czech lover, clues about a cryptic affair, and her visits with a psychiatrist. Who burgled her apartment while Verity lay comatose in the hospital? What secrets does his other long-time friend Adam Yates conceal in transforming himself from a viciously-abused child to a glass-smooth politician? What lies behind Verity’s father’s whiskey and guilt-ridden isolation?

This reviewer did not much care if she ever learned the answers to Verity Hadley’s torment or Harry’s compulsive search for answers. The tale is well-enough crafted, although the pace is glacial. Burke intersperses Harry’s and Verity’s “brilliant summer” when they met at ages 12 and 13 with Harry’s present hunt for answers, much like the pictures on Verity’s zoetrope. “Frozen” is Londoner Richard Burke’s debut novel.

A. Rolfingsmeier

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, A. Rolfingsmeier