Freezing - Softcover

Evans, Penelope

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552997307 ISBN 13: 9780552997300

Publisher: Black Swan, 1997

Synopsis

1st trade edition paperback new In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

About this title

Review

In her first thriller, The Last Girl, London barrister Penelope Evans created a memorable monster--a landlord who would do anything to keep his young, female tenants from leaving--and earned herself strong praise from the likes of Ruth Rendell and Penelope Fitzgerald. In her second book, Evans gives us an even more original central character: Stewart Park, an odd, ugly, very innocent, and ultimately most sympathetic young man who works as a morgue photographer. He becomes obsessed with the frozen body of a fragile blonde drowning victim: "They must have rolled her onto the bank. River police. Everyday sort of work for them, people in the water. But not usually so recent. They would have taken one look at her and tried everything-- mouth to mouth, heart massage, volts of electric--everything short of shaking the life back into her.... She was beautiful. Is it all right to say that? That is what she was--beautiful. Her mouth was wide, and despite all those kisses on the river bank, unimpressed. You could trace every vein in her eyelids. There was even a faint hint of color in her cheeks. The river had done no more than wet her and take her breath away. So why not put her back in the river, and maybe the breath will return to her?" His fascination with the dead girl causes Park to put himself at considerable risk by trying to find out who she was and how she died. And Evans has such a sure grasp on the sadly mundane details of this outwardly bizarre life that we're with him every step of the way. --Dick Adler

From Kirkus Reviews

A lonely morgue photographer's fixation on a late client unleashes madness and violence. But not before Evans (The Last Girl, 1996) takes the time to turn the temperature down well below zero in Stewart Park's little world. Stewart isn't just your ordinary morgue attendant; physically ugly and cursed with a crippling stutter, he'd be a social outcast even if he worked on a movie set. When he goes home from his cheerless workplace, it's to cross swords with his sister Mary (who talks to him only to say she's leaving her two little boys with him again), with his senile father (who seems to live for the moment when Stewart will absent-mindedly leave his bedroom door unlocked so he can sneak inside and paw through Stewart's things), orin the happiest moments of his pitiful lifeto play the computer-game nemesis called Dustraiser. The best-adjusted attendant at the morgue abruptly gets sacked; Mary, who's taken up with a new man who leaves her and the boys bruised, refuses to leave Lee and Lenny alone with her father; Stewart, who's been invited to his mate's engagement party only so he can photograph the happy couple, never thinks to bring his camera. Into this quietly hellish orbitthink of Polanski's film Repulsionspins an unknown dead woman whose face haunts Stewart so powerfully that he takes the photograph of her home so it'll be the first thing he sees each morning and the last thing before sleep each night. The mood is already so grim that it's clear this latest obsession can lead to no good, yet Evans patiently piles on the menace until Stewart finds himself in the middle of a criminal plot that, oddly enough, seems less scarifying than the bleakly and believably normal existence it interrupts. ``There's nothing like words for separating the living and the dead,'' opines Stewart. Maybe, but meanwhile Evans uses every word of her novel to immerse its mousy hero more deeply into his death-in-life. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Black Swan
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0552997307
• ISBN 13: 9780552997300
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286