The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Maggie O'Farrell)***

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a fascinating book. It’s beautifully and rather poetically written, which seems to be quite unusual for books written in the present tense. These tend to be witty and snappy rather than poetic – although there are exceptions, such as Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance.

I wouldn’t call The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox chick lit. It’s probably aimed at an older audience, and there isn’t a lot of romance or humour in it. It’s not an easy book to classify. Perhaps it could be called a mystery story, but it’s certainly not a detective story. It’s frightening and horrific in places, but it probably doesn’t count as horror. There are some sad bits, but you guess quite early on that there is, at the very least, potential for a happy ending. In many ways, The Vanishing Act of Esmé Lennox is a historical novel, but I’ve always found that genre a bit too all-encompassing. Just about any story set in the past counts as historical, whether it is set fifty or fifty thousand years ago; whether it is a happy story or a sad one.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is strange, but compelling. True, parts of the book are quite boring, mostly the parts of the story about Esme’s great-niece Iris, but most of it was intriguing, and I wanted to know what had happened in the past, and how things were going to work out in the future.

But the book doesn’t quite seem finished. A lot of books stop at a really interesting point, leaving you wondering what’s going to happen next, and wishing it wasn’t the end, but so much of the story in this book seems to be missing. It’s quite frustrating to get to the end of the book with so many questions unanswered.

And it’s not just that the book ends prematurely – a lot of the middle of the story seems to be missing too. Although the book spans many years – we see Esme both as a child and as a very old lady – very little of the story is actually told directly. A lot of the time, Iris is listening to Esme telling her story. It’s all very interesting, but it might have been even more gripping if Maggie O’Farrell had shown more from Esme’s point of view and gone into more detail about what happened. There is so much she just touches on that I’d have liked to hear a lot more about. It’s not as though it would make the book too long: it’s actually rather short. There are only 244 pages, and not many words on a page.

Another thing that might have helped would be if Iris had had more of a story. I know the book only covers a very small part of her life, but it would have been good to get to know her as well as we know Esme. There is lots of room in the book for another storyline. All we really get to know about Iris is that she’s dating married Luke, and she once slept with her stepbrother Alex. It’s all very controversial stuff, but it actually makes a bit of an odd contrast with Esme’s story, and there’s no real feeling that the stories are intertwined. There’s no sense that the Esme problem and the boyfriend problem are in any way connected, or that one helps Iris to deal with the other.

But there is a lot I like about this book, and one of them is that, even though there are horrible things happening all over the place. O’Farrell has still created some very lovely characters. Esme, in particular, is very sweet, and her naughtiness is very easy to identify with. Iris is also lovely. Even some of the characters who cause horrible things to happen aren’t so much villains as badly mistaken, and the people who genuinely are nasty still seem like real people, rather than being exaggeratedly villains.

The Nanny**

Jo is depressed and wants a new life. Vanessa and Dick need a nanny for their children. The rest of the book is mostly about how wonderful Jo is, but I don’t actually like her very much.

Jo is supposed to be a very kind person, yet she spends a lot of time looking down on Vanessa and Dick and pitying them for having such a bad relationship. I actually think Vanessa and Dick are a wonderful couple who have a great relationship. It’s true that their relationship isn’t all that strong when Jo comes into their lives, but their scenes together still have a lot of warmth and humour, and I felt from the start that they would work out their problems with or without Jo’s help.

Jo is whiny and miserable, and a total hypocrite. Melissa Nathan clearly believes she’s a lovely girl who’s had a terrible life and deserves a bit of love and sympathy. And she probably does, but it’s very difficult to like a character when the author is trying to ram it down your throat how wonderful and special she is and how much everybody loves her. I kind of feel like I don’t want to waste my sympathy on her. She gets plenty from everyone else, and I was far more worried about Vanessa and Dick, who are having a much more difficult time than Jo, and their insecure but very intelligent daughter Cassandra, who is being bullied at school.

Jo isn’t even particularly good at her job. Okay, she is very depressed, which would account for some of it, but I still think she was very lucky not to get sacked. If Vanessa and Dick hadn’t had so much trouble finding a nanny; if every man Jo laid eyes on didn’t have a habit of falling in love with her on the spot (why?), she could have got herself into serious trouble. The main reason she doesn’t is because policemen Gerry and Nick are even worse at their job than she is at hers.

Jo does have a horrible shock towards the end, and you do feel for her – but there’s just one problem. Jo’s own behaviour is very similar to the behaviour of the person who hurt her. Maybe she hasn’t been behaving that way for as long, or in so serious a manner, but she is far from an innocent victim. The only other characters I don’t like are Josh, Dick’s son and one of Jo’s love interests, and her best friend Sheila. I can’t stand Jo, but the way Josh treats her at first is still really awful. The only time his treatment of Jo seemed reasonable was when he mentioned hearing her having sex with her boyfriend Shaun. Josh didn’t put it in the most tactful way, but I couldn’t get over the fact she’d do it in her employer’s house. And I don’t even remember her asking if he could stay the night. I think that’s really disrespectful.

The Nanny does have some great moments. Nathan has created some wonderful characters, and many of her scenes are original and funny. Without Jo, I’m sure I’d have loved the book. There is quite enough going on for Vanessa, Dick and their children without some snobby, incompetent Mary Poppins wannabe showing up. There are a lot of fart and poo jokes, which I really enjoyed (although I don’t know what real grown-ups would think), and all the characters except one (I think you know which one) are interesting and believable. I really enjoyed the all the subplots, particularly Cassandra’s and Vanessa‘s/Dick’s, and the way they all fitted together. It was good to read a book that focused on the whole family, not just the adults, and Nathan gave the children humour and intelligence, and made sure they weren’t nauseatingly cute.

Dead Famous (Ben Elton)*****

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Fourteen people enter a house so small that a family of four would probably be crowded. They are stirred up to the point where they have trouble controlling themselves, yet still they try to control those around them. Sooner or later, someone was going to get murdered.

Dead Famous opens with a detective at work, trawling through the hundreds of hours of footage of Peeping Tom, a fictional Big Brother. He watches the housemates and despises the housemates, and tries to work out who is the murderer.

As for the readers, we’re probably more concerned about who is the victim. You’re going to be a very long way into the book before you find out!

But this book isn’t slow. There’s so much going on, the murder can wait. Ben Elton has created a group of characters who could easily be interesting members of a real Big Brother household. It doesn’t have the a-laugh-a-paragraph quality of Elton’s X Factor satire, Chart Throb, but the much smaller cast of characters does allow Elton to go into a bit more depth with their personalities. The Big Brother phenomenon was fairly new when the book was published, but Elton has an instinctive understanding of what sort of people might be put into the house.

Dead Famous is a comedy, and a very good one, but the scenes with the detective are much more serious, and not unlike a detective in a more typical crime novel. As I love the comedy genre but am less keen on serious crime fiction, I was more interested in the Big Brother side than in the detective side, and that could be a problem for a lot of readers who are interested in the comedy side. And, while it is certainly an ingenious idea for a murder mystery, there is probably too much Big Brother-style inanity going on to keep a typical crime fan interested. But Elton nevertheless does an excellent job of merging the two genres – it would be difficult to imagine how it could be done better.

Although the earlier series of Big Brother did not have a particular predilection for unusual names and nicknames (well, apart from Bubble), Elton has provided us with plenty – Woggle, Dervla, Moon and Hamish are among the inmates I think the only names that have also been used by a real-life Big Brother housemate are David, who made a very brief appearance during Big Brother 8, and Jason from Big Brother 5, although is the fictional Jason is known as Jazz. (He’s nothing like Jazz in How to Kill Your Husband. He is a much nicer person, although I suppose that’s not much of a compliment.) Then we have Gazzer the Geezer – could he be the inspiration for the real-life Sezer the Geezer? They both say some adorably stupid things, although in Gazzer’s case this is because he actually is stupid - Sezer’s got a faulty connection between his brain and his mouth, but his brain is in there somewhere.

One thing that really bothered me was the way the housemates are viewed by the public. Elton only acknowledges the housemates in the first two series of Big Brother, and series 1 and 2 were quite different from the more recent shows. So Elton can’t really be blamed for not knowing the current trends But, in order for the book to work, you do have to accept that it is possible for thick, tarty Kelly to be not the subject of ‘get her out’ chants but the second favourite to win. You have to believe that isolated older gay female Sally could escape nomination for several weeks in a house where everyone gets on well for the most part. Even if friendly Layla’s controlling streak was recognised as early as Week One (I thought she was lovely), you’d be more likely to go for the older and quieter people. Peeping Tom is technically not Big Brother, so there’s no reason why things shouldn’t be a little bit different, and the producers can probably turn the housemates into anything they want to with a bit of ingenuity in the editing. But it wasn’t always easy to put aside my expectations.

Tuesday's Child (Louise Bagshawe)**

I have given Tuesday’s Child only two stars because there is a lot that frustrates me about the book. But it does have many strengths, and if you’re a different sort of person from me, the strengths will quite likely not be overridden by all the things I didn’t like. So I’ll tell you now – Louise Bagshawe’s novel has many genuinely funny moments, and some really lovely characters. The central character, Lucy, is very sweet in her naivety, and her best friend Ollie is absolutely gorgeous. Some of the other characters are a bit one-dimensional, but that doesn’t matter in this sort of comedy because part of the point is that they’re so fake, they really would seem one-dimensional if you met them in person. Lucy’s snobby, bitchy workmates are called Jade, Buffy and Melissa – somehow, I can’t imagine a better trio of names. And there’s a wanker called James as well – see Lucy in the Sky, Holly’s Inbox and Watermelon.

Tuesday’s Child is Cinderella. Rags to riches. The ugly duckling who becomes a swan. But, for me, it’s a story that’s unrewarding. It’s all very well for Cinderella to meet her Prince if that’s what she wants. But if all Lucy (yes, she’s another of those stupid Lucys, but not too stupid to know what she wants from life) wants is to write about computer games and play football with the lads, she ought to be able to do that.

Maybe most chick lit readers want to read about typical girls, and require the weird girls to acquire at least an element of typicality in order to be considered a likeable character. If this is true, it’s a shame because there are too many books, magazines and people around already telling you that unless girls look good and dress well and give a shit about what perfume they’re wearing (I don’t think I even own any perfume), they are never going to get anywhere in life. I don’t agree with that attitude at all. I would so much rather read about someone with a bit of originality about them ending up happy.

When Lucy gets a job as a secretary with a group of girls who happen to wear expensive clothes all the time, it’s fair enough for her to wear those clothes at work. She doesn’t have a choice about that. But why should she suddenly start wearing those clothes outside work as well? It’s not even as though her workmates are nice, kind, friendly, interesting people. Lucy has no desire to be like them. She had no desire to dress like them before, so why start now?

Of course, Lucy does eventually realise that her job doesn’t suit her, and she leaves. (I might as well give that part of the plot away as that’s usually what does happen in novels like this.) But we never see her playing football again. And that’s a shame because she is astonishingly good. She can play in a team of guys, and score goals against an all-male opposition. Even if she wasn’t good at it, the point is she loves it. She shouldn’t have to stop playing because it’s not very girly. She should be allowed to be the person she is, and to enjoy being that person.

One of Bagshawe’s reasons for changing Lucy’s personality is because she is, apparently, ‘not very mature’. The proof of this is her decision to review computer games for a living. Well, what’s wrong with that? Someone’s got to do it, and why not her? Computer games are not aimed at people of a particular age. Lucy’s only twenty-four, anyway – not that age matters. I don’t think people should be made to feel that there’s any kind of age limit on the things they enjoy. There will be some exceptions to that: for both practical and legal reasons, a mature male can’t start playing rugby with a group of small boys in the park. But there’s no reason he shouldn’t play with people his own age and own size.

Lucy is eventually permitted to return to her computer games – but she does so in a way that’s mature and worthwhile and helps others. There’s nothing wrong with helping others. On the contrary, I think it’s something everyone should do when they can. But Lucy doesn’t need something like this in order to make playing computer games at her age acceptable. There’s no need at all for Lucy to do anything spectacular or revolutionary.

It alienates us because most of us will never get to do anything like that. Even if we wanted to, the chances are we would never have the opportunity. Also (although maybe I’m wrong about this), I don’t think Lucy’s innovation actually exists in our world – certainly not to the extent the book suggests it does. And if it does, Lucy is more or less being credited with it, which is completely unfair and wrong.

Even if Bagshawe felt very strongly that Lucy did need to use her computer skills in an unselfish and helpful way, it was a mistake to have it happen out of nowhere. The theme needs to be strongly in place from the start. It’s fine for it to be subtle – but, when it happens, we need to be looking back and thinking: Yes, of course. This is exactly the sort of thing Lucy has been looking for all along, and this is exactly what she needs to make her happy, and even though it was a surprise, I can look back on the story and see Bagshawe was leading up to it the whole time.

Instead, I was kind of left thinking… what????

If You Could See Me Now (Cecelia Ahern)*****

Invisible friends are real! I always knew it and Cecelia Ahern proves it in this amazing book. It’s about Elizabeth, who is unsociable and works far too hard (just like Elisabeth in Seeing Me Naked and Elizabeth in An Absolute Scandal), her six year old nephew Luke, who is sweet if scarily self-contained (a bit like Luke in the Shopaholic books), and their invisible friend, Ivan.

Ivan is the perfect friend. He makes friends with children who are unhappy, and helps them to overcome their problems. I’m quite surprised it was published in a way. If any non-invisible men started hanging round children like that, they’d probably be arrested, but the last thing you’d call Ivan is a paedophile. He’s a bit like a child himself. He loves swivelly chairs. He loves sliding on the grass and playing with toy fire engines. And he doesn’t like playing with girls. In many ways, he’s more like a six year old than Luke is.

Elizabeth and Ivan don’t think much of each other at first. To Ivan, Elizabeth is no more than an uptight, bossy adult who refuses to believe he exists. To Elizabeth, Ivan is just her nephew’s invisible friend - something to be very concerned about, but not someone who actually exists. Even when she meets Ivan for herself, Elizabeth (not unsurprisingly) assumes that he’s the inspiration for Luke’s friend, rather than the man himself.

Both of them are emotionally stunted in their way. Elizabeth is closed off from caring about others – her parents and younger sister Saoirse have continually made her unhappy, and she has trouble expressing love towards Luke. Ivan lives in a platonic world where there appear to be no such things as romance and sex. While his experience and intelligence have taught him a lot about people, his outlook on life is childish in many ways. Slowly Elizabeth and Ivan begin to appreciate one another’s different qualities. Elizabeth needs to learn to relax and have fun, and there are times when even Ivan needs to take life seriously.

Few couples in fiction are more deserving of happiness. Elizabeth has been denied it for too long, and Ivan has never really thought about it before. Watching them fall in love is great because you can see exactly what’s happening, but they don’t do it in the normal, boring, conventional way. They’re not boring, normal, conventional people, and one of the strengths of this book is that they never lose their individuality. But, as with any storybook romance, there are problems to be overcome.

One reason I love the book is because a lot of the characters all seem to be a bit autistic, like me. Elizabeth is isolated and unsociable, and has trouble with the concept of games, particularly imaginary ones (I love imaginary games, but that’s supposed to be unusual). She doesn’t feel comfortable with the idea of friendships because of the time and effort it’s going to take. (It can be a serious mental effort to remember all the conversational conventions that don’t come naturally. Friendship can still be very rewarding, but an acquaintance based on nothing but proximity is mentally exhausting.) The people whose friendship Elizabeth appreciates are those who might sometimes endeavour to change her views, but nevertheless show respect for her as an individual.

Ivan is immature for an adult (like me), although at times he can look at things in a logical and detached way (also an autistic trait). He’s pretty much asexual (me too, probably: I love flirting, but genitals are pretty disgusting, aren’t they?), and his interest in Elizabeth all the more moving because he obviously isn’t after a shag. Even though Ivan is in the business of making friends and supporting people, the friendships only last for as long as the support is needed, and after that there’s no further contact. In some ways, Ivan’s relationships are more like doctor/patient relationships than genuine friendships. Once the person he is helping is feeling better, they no longer see Ivan – literally as well as figuratively, so the task is clearly completed, and it’s time to move on. If I was like Ivan, I could play lots of games to get to know people instead of faffing about with all this adult ‘how are you, I’m fine’ business which seems a bit pointless when you’re supposed to say you’re fine whether you are or not. The people with whom Ivan forms friendships are children like Luke and similarly struggling adults like Elizabeth and Saoirse, neither of whom socialise on a typical adult level (Luke comes closest), and also the people in his own world, where his motives and feelings are always understood. It is likely they wouldn’t be understood by most adults, who would naturally be very concerned about this strange man hanging around the kids, and they would probably find his playful language inappropriate because it doesn’t follow normal conversational rules.

Saoirse has acquaintances that come and go, but no obvious friendships, Elizabeth appearing to be the only constant in her life. Some might see Saoirse as mistrustful and aggressive, but maybe she’s just very desperate and needy, yet without the social confidence to be able to express that she needs help. To me, she seems more like someone who doesn’t understand people than someone who hates them. It’s never explained why Saoirse can see Ivan – until meeting Elizabeth, the only people to have seen him were the children he was helping – but I suspect it’s because Saoirse is quite seriously emotionally stunted as well, as well as being undeniably in need of help. Saoirse has given birth to Luke, but has failed to bond with him. It seems to me as though it’s her constant inability to understand the world that leads her to behave so badly – and to be able to see Ivan. The one weakness of the book is that Saoirse’s storyline is never resolved, but a number of flashbacks help you to see how life has gone so wrong for Saoirse (and Elizabeth), despite all Elizabeth’s attempts to look after her. Saoirse could have been the villain character, but she seems more unhappy, confused and lost than horrible. Not that I’d want her turning up drunk at my house, but, as a character, I love her.

The story is mostly told from Elizabeth’s point of view and Ivan’s, but occasionally we see Elizabeth as others see her. Unusually, some of the sections from Ivan’s point of view are told in the third person, and some in the first person. It’s not clear why, but it does work quite well. Most of the time, the first person sections are when Ivan addresses the reader directly – it’s almost as though the whole book is in the third person, and the first person sections are effectively in speech marks. If the sections had had actual speech marks, the book might well have seemed clumsier – speech marks can become quite confusing where the speaker starts recounting conversations – and in a way speech marks could have had a distancing effect because writers don’t use speech marks as a rule when addressing their readers.

This book shows you that there is more to love than sex. That you can learn from other people, including those who are different from you. That it’s okay to be a bit different, but it is possible learn the things you want to learn, however impossible they seem. And, above all, that there is nothing wrong with having invisible friends. Because most of them are real anyway.

Shopaholic and Baby (Sophie Kinsella)*****

I don’t have a shopping problem. My interest in clothes is limited to how warm they are and how pink they are – apart from that, I’m not interested.

So I should hate Becky. She and I have nothing in common. The nearest I get to shopaholism is when I go to Waterstones and the 3for2 offer is just too good to resist. I even get 3for2 at WHSmiths sometimes, which is really exciting because officially they only do Buy1Get1Half-Price. But that’s not the same as being a shopaholic. That’s just about budgeting and being sneaky and comparing which are the best deals.

Okay, you’re right, that’s exactly the sort of thing Becky says. The only difference between us is that Becky is better-dressed than me. But I’m probably better-read. I’ve read Penny Vincenzi’s An Absolute Scandal all the way through. And Ulysses twice. So obviously I never have time to go clothes shopping.

You don’t need to have a clue about clothes or fashion to enjoy this book. It doesn’t matter if a clothes shop is practically an alien world. It’s all about loving something so much, the desire to possess it sends your brain into overdrive and physically prevents you from making connections between the prices of your desired item and the state of your bank account. Most people can relate to that. Probably a lot of us have also had the experience of when something happens that makes you look horribly stupid in front of people you don’t want to look stupid in front of. So you tell a little lie to get yourself out of looking stupid, and the lie gets bigger and bigger and bigger…

Okay, maybe that doesn’t happen to everyone, but it seems to happen to Becky almost every day. Maybe she doesn’t always use her considerable imaginative powers in the best or most convincing way possible, but watching Becky talking herself out of one embarrassment, and, more often than not, into one ten times worse, is an eye-opening experience. And a hysterically funny one as well.

Shopaholic & Baby (not that the baby appears until nearly the end) was the first Shopaholic book I read. You can read the books in any order, but Shopaholic & Baby isn’t a bad one to read first. As Becky is pregnant and married to rich, sexy Luke (phwoar!!!!!), it doesn’t seem to matter that she can’t stop spending. She’s hormonal, and he’s loaded, so it doesn’t seem that serious. And that’s actually good because it’s funnier when it’s not serious.

But Luke’s riches do have their downside. It means Becky can afford to see the great Venetia Carter (there seem to be a lot of bitches called Venetia in Sophie Kinsella’s books), obstetrician to the stars, and this backfires rather when Becky discovers Venetia is Luke’s ex-girlfriend – beautiful, sexy, intelligent, and apparently still interested in Luke. Becky, on the other hand, doesn’t realise that she’s very intelligent herself (when she uses her brain), and no-one with her lovely personality could fail to look beautiful. And her very strong interest in clothes can only help her to look good. But, of course, she’s pregnant, which means she’s not as thin as Venetia. And her hormones aren’t doing anything for her self-esteem. But Becky’s fears are more than reasonable enough to keep the book going, providing not only some hysterically funny moments, but some really serious and gripping moments. Especially as Luke really does seem to be lying to her.

Shopaholic & Baby isn’t the most realistic book in the world, but it’s fun and funny and you seriously don’t know what Becky’s going to come out with next. She’s a liar and she’s shallow, but she’s very warm-hearted and absolutely adorable. Luke is adorable too. Even though I quite wanted him for myself (like a lot of fictional Lukes, he is a bit underemotional, but there’s something really sexy about guys with their own company – like Blue in An Absolute Scandal), they do have a lovely relationship, so you really, really want them to work their problems out. Becky’s suspicions might seem reasonable, but Luke is so lovely, you can’t help hoping he’s not the type to be unfaithful - even though this would dramatically reduces your own minuscule (why does he have to be fictional???) chances of stealing him.

How to Kill Your Husband (And Other Handy Household Hints) (Kathy Lette)*

Poor, poor Cassie. Her husband Rory has left her for their marriage therapist Bianca, and her boss doesn’t think she’s suited to the Deputy Head’s position. Her best friend Jazz’s husband isn’t being terribly faithful either. So Cassie deserves a bit of sympathy, doesn’t she?

No. None at all. Cassie is irritating and neurotic. Rory really is better off even with the sexually free and deeply unprofessional Bianca. As for the Deputy Head position, it’s difficult to imagine anyone less suitable than Cassie. Yes, her rival, Priscilla, is a snide cow. Definitely. But at least you know she’ll work hard and get the job done. Cassie doesn’t treat either her job or her colleagues with respect, and it’s difficult to believe she cares for anyone apart from herself. Even if she really is as useless as she appears to be, she’s not nearly responsible enough for a teaching job. There’s no way I’d want her looking after my children. And my children would be used to incompetent adults because they’d have me.

Jazz isn’t much better. She’s just a whiny, bitchy, horrible person. I don’t blame her husband one bit for leaving her. If I was her husband, the book would probably be called How to Kill Your Wife. (Or maybe How to Kill Your Stalker because I wouldn’t marry her if you offered me free books at Waterstones for the rest of my life. Not that I’d kill her really. That’s just a joke.) Jazz is supposed to be terribly beautiful and a ‘domestic goddess’ (what does that mean anyway?), but I’m not going to start liking someone just because her best friend tells me she’s beautiful. I’m more interested in their personalities. And Jazz’ (or Jasmine’s: Kathy Lette has a tendency to use Jasmine’s full name when denoting a possessive) personality is pretty much nonexistent. There’s just enough unpleasantness on the surface to make you wish someone would come along and kill her, but there’s nothing underneath. She’s so shallow I would call her plastic, but she doesn’t have enough substance to be plastic. Jazz is cardboard.

Their freaky friend Hannah is actually quite interesting at times, but she’s not that nice either. She’d have been great as the sharp, slightly bitchy best friend if Cassie and Jazz had been likeable. Sometimes Hannah can be quite witty, and she is probably an original character as far as the world of chick lit goes. Most chick litty career women end up domesticated, so it’s always nice to read about one who doesn’t, and doesn’t want to be. But Hannah still isn’t nice enough to hold my interest. And I’m surprised she isn’t the one who ended up murdered: if she’d said ‘dah-ling’ one more time I think I’d have screamed.

Bianca is a mixture of the therapist cliché and the typical husband stealer. She’s a bit one-dimensional, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if the rest had all been properly characterised. She is very funny. The best character in the book is Rory – he’s as useless as Cassie, but he’s quite amusing sometimes. He’s someone who could possibly exist. And you’ve got to admire him really. The poor guy’s married to Cassie, and he’s only had one affair. He’s incredible.

But the main problem with How to Kill Your Husband is that it’s chronically unfunny. It was clearly supposed to be a comedy: the dialogue is fast and snappy, and the characters’ conversations take turns you wouldn’t expect. Lette sets up her sentences and paragraphs as though she’s leading up to a very clever and funny joke – but the jokes never seem to come. There were times when I could see where the jokes were supposed to be, but somehow this book didn’t suit my sense of humour at all. It’s supposed to be the way women talk when there aren’t any men around. If this is true, I’m very glad that most of my friends are men.

And as for the murder – could it be any more ridiculous? To be fair, it is possible to write about a crime that doesn’t work and still create a thrilling piece of literature - Sophie Hannah’s Hurting Distance might not be the most realistic book in the world, but it’s beautifully written, and her characters are a million times more appealing than Lette’s. (Yes, most of Sophie Hannah’s characters are criminals, and even the nicer ones probably ought to be locked up for one reason or another. But Hurting Distance is an involving, intriguing and impressive book. How to Kill Your Husband isn’t.) Lette apparently is very popular, but the best thing about this book is that it’s quite short. And (as I got it 3for2) it was technically free.