Twisted, by Lynda La Plante

The best book written by a French plant I've ever read

Judge it by the cover

We have another small person, from the back. Female, and non-descript. And some long-exposure light trail effect. I guess that adds an idea of movement and action. Vehicles whizzing around. The flats in the picture look like some crappy council estate, in pebble-dash concrete. And there are birds in the sky. If that helps. I strongly suspect that the image of the woman in the centre is super-imposed. She wasn’t there. She looks too fancy.

How was it?

Not bad at all.

Our main character is Lena Fulford. The first chapter of the book had all the hallmarks of a “woman turns life around” story. Lena is post divorce, introverted and a little socially awkward, and a successful enterpreneur. That’s a pretty standard recipe for crappy cutesy women’s books that normally end with someone learning to love themselves, and quitting their high-powered job to start a café or a second hand bookshop in Exeter.

But no… I was way off.

We learn about Marcus, Lena’s ex-husband. Marcus is the gregarious, outgoing one in their marriage, and appears to be the irresponsible, flighty one too. They’re busy, wealthy people. Since their separation 2 years ago Lena still hasn’t met anyone else and from the sounds of it, isn’t really planning to.

They also have a daughter, Amy. She’s a bit of a wonderchild. Academically brilliant, athletic, beautiful. The kind of kid other normal kids would secretly hate. And she goes missing. It’s a bit messy, but she’s already living separately between her parents homes, a boarding school, and is meant to be at a friend’s house for the weekend. Due to everyone just assuming she’s somewhere else, she’s missing for about 3 days before they all twig.

So then the police get involved. There are a number of police people involved but the most important is Detective Reid. A well meaning, good chap cop who makes it a personal mission to get to the bottom of the matter. There’s a quick assumption that, given that she’s such a nice kid, Amy has probably been abducted or snatched, rather than run away. So we have a quick tour through a few suspects.

Lena lives in a huge great fancy house in some posh part of London, with a house maid called Agnes, and a driver called Harry. They’re both dreadful people, as soon as you scratch the surface, which presumably Lena hasn’t really thought to do. The finger gets pointed at both of them, but eventually they’re eliminated - as suspects, this isn’t The Hunger Games.

Then the prime suspect becomes the dad, Marcus. He’s broke, has been unsuccessful in all his own business ventures, and as it turns out, a total womaniser. He’s closing deals left and right, just never the business kind. So he’s roughly got the profile of the kind of guy who might abuse, hide, murder, or make a nice Bourgignon out of his daughter.

Then we find the journal. It changes everything. It’s thought to contain the secret thoughts of Amy, the wonder daughter, and it turns out, she hates absolutely everyone. She rips her parents apart, and performs a form of brutal character assassination on all of her school friends, and almost everyone she knows. So suddenly, the all-star golden child isn’t so golden. She is in fact, secretly, a hateful little brat. She also happens to know all of the inner disgusting details of her father’s sex life - in graphic detail. Which also doesn’t look good for him.

The police go nuts with it and conclude that the journal is written by a girl with Disassociative Identity Disorter - or split personalities. It’s likely to be indicative of serious childhood trauma and sexual or physical abuse. So it’s also looking pretty bad for naughty old Marcus.

We meet a number of her school friends, teachers and particularly her art teacher, Miss Polka. In the words of Detective Reid, his colleagues, and pretty much everyone who ever meets her, she’s “really sexy”. And also, it eventually turns out, a closet lesbian teaching in an all girls school.

So, without wanting to go through every single twist in turn (of which there are rather a lot), it turns out that while the dad might be a bit of a perv, he’s done nothing wrong. The journal wasn’t written by Amy. It was written by Lena, who reveals herself to be far more unhinged and mental than the average bear. And that brings us to the real conclusion of the book, which somehow I felt let down by.

I’ve seen a few books that do this, and it’s a difficult trick. It’s inevitable that for at least the central character of a book, the author exposes the inner workings of their brain and thoughts. So, how can you make that person eventually turn out to be guilty, when they’ve spent the whole book crying and wailing in pain at their loss? Well, they have to be so insane they don’t know they did it. It can’t be a coincidence that in almost every book where they slowly identify a killer, that it turns out not to be the person doing the investigating… because looking for yourself is definitely a novel move.

It turns out that Lena is the victim of historic child abuse, and is a full blown crazy person, with around 10 divergent and split identities, all fighting for space in just 1 crazy little brain. And one of those personalities in particular killed her parents, her husband, and eventually Agnes and Harry, among others. But she didn’t kill her daughter. Neither did Marcus.

Amy has simply got sick of her crazy-arsed parents and done a runner with the super-hot art teacher, who she’s in love with, ish. They do a bunk together to Mexico (which seemed a surprising destination, given that they’re starting from London, not Nevada) and eventually it’s good old Detective Reid who works it all out, gets Lena locked up in a loonie bin and goes and tracks down the ladies. By that time Amy has decided to move on and ditched Miss Polka, presumedly to go and collect her huge inheritance. It seems she really wasn’t a bad kid, she just had difficult parents and needed some distance.

I did like the fact that, in a fairly unusual literary move, Detective Reid actually becomes disillusioned with the police force and his role. At the end of the story, you don’t really know his next move but it’s pretty clear he’s not going back to his old life. It’s weird, but despite this book having, technically a happy ending - the missing girl isn’t dead - it’s really quite sad all round. Everyone loses, everyone ends up alone, Reid has lost everything, and a lot of people end up dead. It’s still a great read.

The whole “too crazy to know you did it” angle just didn’t quite work for me. It just felt a little too easy and cheap. I guess it must exist, and there must be people out there who are that crazy, but I’ve never met any, and I struggle to imagine them being high functioning, running successful businesses and fooling everyone, until well into middle age. Maybe that’s my fault though, not the author’s.

Also I have absolutely no idea what the crappy council flats on the cover are all about. The whole story happens in posh rich places like Belgravia and Chelsea. Maybe they couldn’t find any pictures of those…?