Freezing-C

Evans is a young London writer and lawyer with a distinct knack for macabre chills. Her new book, after The Last Girl (1997), takes as its improbable hero narrator Stewart Park, an abject stutterer of weird appearance who lives in a fantasy world of his own and works as a photographer in a morgue. Into the morgue one cold night comes the body of a lovely young woman drowned in the Thames, and Stewart, obsessed with the image of her frozen beauty, resolves to find out who she is and what happened to her. He has plenty of problems of his own in one of those gothic slum households beloved of contemporary English writers: his aging father is an eccentric who may also be a child molester; his angry sister gravitates to bullying men who mistreat her two appealing small sons; and his only comfort seems to be a computer game he has devised. Stewart's search for the dead girl's identity breaks him out of his fantasy shell but also places him in terrible danger--and, in a frightful climactic moment, forces him to come to terms with the specter that has haunted his own unhappy family. Evans's grasp of Stewart's macabre world is sure, and his strange workmates at the morgue are wonderfully characterized. It is only in the real-life machinations that led to the drowned girl's death and in the remorseless pursuit of Stewart by some rather dimly motivated thugs that the plot machinery gets a little creaky. Still, for its gripping atmosphere and a truly original protagonist, Evans's book is a winner. (July)