In Your Face Book

Following the success of Dead Clever, this is Scarlett Thomas's second "Lily Pascale" story: A fast-paced murder mystery in the tradition of the amateur female sleuth (Lily is a lecturer in crime fiction at a University somewhere in Devon). Keenly aware of its own fictional conventions-- Lily is a reader, a woman who knows her debt to Edgar Allan Poe and Miss Marple--In Your Face plays suspense against cliché when the worlds of academia, journalism and profiling collide: After receiving a troubled phone call from an old University friend (Jess), Lily becomes embroiled in solving the murder of three young women. An unsuccessful hack, Jess has just published an article on the women--all victims of stalking--for a gossip magazine. On the morning of publication, all three are murdered, Jess disappears and Lily, a somewhat casual but compulsive detective, goes to London. Presenting itself as a puzzle--from the Prologue, in which two boys and a girl are discovered having sex in a posh boarding-school to the killer's narrative spliced with Lily's account of her various London adventures-- In Your Face is dead clever. It is a pleasant piece of escapism, unashamed of its conventions or of the odd surprise. --Vicky LebeauRead More