Customer Reviews

Staring in the Light

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Staring at the Light is brutal, surprising, deeply knowing, and wonderfully written. Why are women so poorly treated in Fyfield's books? In the mid-1960s, Jean-Luc Godard said that he would have something to say about the Vietnam War in every film he made until the United States military withdrew from Southeast Asia. I wonder if Fyfield's focus on violence toward women is not something along the same lines. P.D. James and Ruth Rendell have both had very good things to say about Ms. Fyfield but I do not think you can praise her writing sufficiently. She is a lawyer's writer, a mystery-lover's novelist, a Booker Prize-type author and I think her work is as good as it gets. And when someone gets thrown off a balcony in Staring at the Light, I was as shocked as if I had witnessed the event myself. Or it had been me. I hardly ever have exactly that kind of experience when reading. The unabridged audiotape of Staring at the Light is a special sort of experience as well. It has all the qualities of old-time radio drama. Once you pick up a Fyfield mystery, you are not likely to be doing much other than reading it until the pages stop.

Ms. Fyfield is an intelligent and talented writer indeed (though perhaps a bit too clever, since her plots tend to get bogged down in abstruse cleverness), but I would like to read one of her books in which a sympathetic female character is not tortured, beaten up, or mutilated in a particularly graphic way. This one is no exception, involving nasty, bloody, unanesthetized torture in a dentist's chair. What she puts her women through! And why, one wonders? Is this our punishment for just wanting a good read and taking her away from her law practice? Give us a break!

There must be something in her past that leaves London solicitor Sarah Fortune with a motley crew of losers for clients. Perhaps it was the lover who brutally beat her. The only group worse than Sarah's customers is her lovers. Her current client is Belfast bomb-maker and artist Cannon Smith.

Cannon worries about the safety of his wife Julie from his worst enemy, his twin brother Johnny.

STARING AT THE LIGHT is a taut psychological thriller that keeps readers on the edge of their seat until the final climax. Cannon and Sarah are deep individuals with pasts that shape their present and future. However, the tale belongs to the sociopath Johnny who finds hurting people to attain his goals as more than an acceptable practice. He takes pleasure from inflicting pain. Frances Fyfield provides her audience with a tight psychological thriller that will gain the author new readers.

Harriet Klausner