Fault Lines
by Natasha Cooper
Simon & Schuster, 346 pages, hardback, 1999
A few years ago, Kingsford – somewhere in the Home Counties – was terrorized by the so-called Kingsford Rapist, whose assaults culminated in murder and who thereafter desisted. Now there has been another grisly sex murder, clearly a copycat crime, and the cops, under plodding family-man cliché Chief Inspector William Femur (a name for which, one can't help feeling, he must have often had his leg pulled), set off in lumbering pursuit of the perpetrator. Also in pursuit is pluckily-beautiful-but-intelligent-with-it cliché feminist barrister Trish Maguire, who, unlike most series amateur detectives, here does little more than some rather aimless snooping around.
There are other feminist stereotypes here as well: the males are almost without exception caricatured as malign, inadequate, sexist or just plain stupid – or all of these – whereas the women are almost equally universally intelligent, industrious, civilized and in all ways superior to mere masculine scum, right down to their dress sense and not forgetting the fine cut of their faces and figures. The sole exception is the deceased, who is permitted to have been dowdy; indeed, she is by far the most interesting character in the book, and it's a pity Cooper was unable to develop her, through flashback or other means, to the extent she merits.
Despite the nature of the crime and the serial-killer aspects, frissons of horror are not so much few and far between as nonexistent. To be sure, we have lengthy descriptions of the initial murder and of (no cigars for guessing this one) the attempt by the psychopath on Trish herself – a scene that seems to be the sole justification for the designated heroine's inclusion in the book, just as if she were the bimbo romantic appeal in a B-movie who's been told not to wander off but does. Neither of these scenes, however, generates the remotest tingle: cardboard characterization and a lack of atmosphere doom them. Matters are not helped by the plotting, which takes the form of a whodunnit. It is a convention of the whodunnit that, early on, there's presented a thunderingly obvious solution which the reader knows is not the correct one. In this book, to our escalating disbelief, we are tediously led through knots of false deduction so stupid that it cannot be credited real people would ever think this way to reach, not some surprise denouement, but ... that thunderingly obvious solution!
A mystery that doesn't mystify, a thriller that doesn't thrill, and packed with the kind of stereotyped, dumbed-down feminism that makes any real feminist see red – as if all the other failings are somehow okay just because the author's heart is in the right place ... Added irritations are a type-size so large as seemingly to be designed for the visually impaired and the proliferation of blank pages at chapter heads, presumably both measures to make the text look more substantial than it is.
—Samhain