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Deborah Moggach is the author of thirteen previous novels, the most recent being Tulip Fever. Her TV screenplays include her own Close Relations and the highly acclaimed Love in a Cold Climate for the BBC. She is Chair of the Society of Authors and lives in London.
A well executed, intricately plotted novel which nevertheless disappoints. Natalie is a bright, pretty young woman whose life is too ordinary and disappointing for her ambitions. She works in the accounts department of a large telecommunications company and lives with an unreliable boyfriend in an undesirable area of Leeds. She has no family to speak of: only a mother who appears occasionally and is more of a liability than support, and a father who disappeared when she was a child. So she must take care of herself. A swift and potentially devastating series of events leads Natalie to a position of reckless defiance and she embarks on a career of crime with unforeseen tragic consequences for the innocent lives her actions affect. Deborah Moggach is an experienced writer, good at cutting through cant and self-deceit and dissecting the complex tawdriness at the heart of modern life, but this novel is glib. The major characters, Natalie in particular, are hard to like and it becomes difficult to care about how the plot works itself out, or what happens to their sad, shattered lives (Kirkus UK)
