Originally published on my blog here in August 1999.After six or seven Mitchell and Markby novels, Ann Granger has written a detective novel outside the series, almost completely different in tone and background. Her central character, Fran Varady, is about to be thrown out of the condemned building in which she is squatting when one of the others in the house is found dead, hanging from the light fitting in her room. At first thought to be suicide, it soon becomes clear that her death is murder.Fran starts to look into the murder partly because it soon becomes clear to her that the squatters are the main suspects, and partly because relatives of the dead girl ask her to do so. Fran is not at all like their preconceptions of a squatter; she is well spoken, well educated and from a good background; she is neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic.This in fact brings us to the heart of the novel, which is to do with the true nature of those who live in what is frequently considered Britain's underclass. None of those who lived with Fran were particularly unusual; they were normal people who for one reason or another had ended up in a squat. Asking For Trouble is unusual among detective stories about people in this type of background in that the squatters are not stereotypes. On the other hand, the police are not attacked either, the main reasons that they come over in a bad light being institutional bureaucracy (ill equipped to deal with the rather unofficial lifestyle of the squatters), and the prejudices of individual officers. So often crime novels reinforce a right-wing view of the world, in which squatters (or New Age travellers, or the homeless) are depraved addicts, and policemen guardians of virtue, and it is nice to see a writer making them all out to be normal, imperfect people.As well as this point in its favour, Asking for Trouble is well written, in a style which reminded me of Ruth Rendell. Granger is better at writing about young people than either Rendell or P.D. James, and so her main character is not only sympathetic but also believable.
The biggest problem was the main character, who was a tedious idiot.SPOILERS!!She's sure who the killer is and does really dumb things! She continually spends time alone with this person. What kind of moron spends time alone with someone they think killed someone? At one point she goes horse-riding with him (she's never ridden a horse, so you know Something Bad will happen. And it does. CONTRIVED, CONTRIVED, CONTRIVED!) It was incredibly frustrating.Then not once, but TWICE tension builds and she gets a big scare. And it turns out it's her best friend. TWICE! LAME! Also, the author has quite a few mysteries under her belt, so you know that the person you think is the killer, isn't. And, really, there were so many clues pointing to this wrong person it got tedious, because you knew that he couldn't be the killer. But then who? I had quite a few scenarios in mind for why Terry ran away from home, but when we get to the big reveal, it was a huge let-down. It didn't make sense. She didn't have to run away from home to avoid this person. She could have told people she was afraid of the killer, that he was a bit crazy and she could have stayed home.So, botttom line, this book didn't work for me and I'm not going to waste my time on her other books.
What do You think about Asking For Trouble (1997)?
#1 *Asking For Trouble* [8 hours 11 mins] blurb - Fran Varady is living in a "squat" (she's one of a group of illegal tenants in a building scheduled to be torn down -- they just pulled off some boards and moved in, because there's a severe shortage of housing in London and they can't afford housing). Her dreams of becoming an actress, nurtured when her father and grandmother were still alive, seem a long way off. But the quietly resolute Fran, for all her youth and apparent vulnerability, is a survivor. The local housing council is on the verge of evicting them when one of the squatters is found dead -- it's made to look like an accident, but clearly there's signs of a struggle. The police suspect that the killer is one of the other squatters Fran manages to finally convince them that none of them did it, but she sets out to find the killer. She ends up investigating the victim's family home in the english countryside, where being a city girl, she is truly a duck out of water, and nearly a dead one... 3* A Restless Evil (Mitchell and Markby #14)
—Bettie☯
