This proved to be a major disappointment. I had enjoyed Joan Smith’s previous novels featuring the engaging Loretta Lawson, the earnest, feminist academic with an alarming penchant for finding herself caught up in murder cases, and consequently was looking forward to this one.

Written in the mid-1990s, it marked a bit of a departure from her earlier cases as Loretta is in America, having spent a year as visiting professor at a university in California (unspecified, but readily identifiable as UCLA, one of my own alma maters). As the novel opens, she has just arrived in New York, where she will be spending a few days flat sitting for a friend before departing back to the UK. Right from the opening of the book, she finds herself oppressed by New York. It is the height of summer and the city is unpleasantly hot, and seems relentlessly noisy. People’s tempers are ragged, and there is an irrepressible undercurrent of agitation. Once established in the friend’s flat, she tries to relax, but finds that she is soon beset by nuisance phone calls, that become increasingly disturbing. She also start to feel as if she is being watched as she wanders around the city, trying to take in some of the sights, and visit various galleries.

Smith builds the sense of tension effectively, and the reader can easily empathise with Loretta’s response to the growing sense of alarm. Unfortunately, the actual plot is not sufficiently strong to live up to this scenario setting. While her previous novels had been soundly constructed, with immensely plausible characters and storylines, this one relied too heavily on coincidence, flimsy conjecture and a host of characters with little hint of plausibility at all.

I see that this was Joan Smith’s last Loretta Lawson novel, which is a shame in some ways, although in other ways I might have preferred for her to have bowed out with the previous novel, rather than having it end with one that lets the series down. ( )

tl;dr: University of Oxford now hiring English lecturer. Successful candidate will have a thorough knowledge of Jacobean punctuation and be a proven dingbat.

Loretta Lawson is a woman of the world and a well-regarded academic who is stopping in New York on her way home to Oxford after a stint at Berkeley. But Loretta Lawson is risibly fearful, a little woman in need of protection, and she's dumb as a box of rocks. Maybe she was in Berkeley because she thought Disneyland was in San Francisco? maybe she's an academic in the sense of being the only teacher in her pre-school who checks out library books? Or, given that Joan Smith wrote a book of essays on feminist concerns, maybe this is a satire on the notion that, bless their hearts, women are helpless creatures? Apparently none of those; I leafed through the pages I didn't read and came across nothing that would suggest anything of the sort.

In the taxi from LaGuardia Lawson is tense with worry because the driver could conceivably be a Bad Guy, and when the taxi is overtaken (passed) by men on motorcyles she is more frightened still although, to give her credit, she cannily holds her handbag tight so that the bikers won't be able to steal it should they em bring the taxi to a halt and the driver in collusion with them conveniently disappear. But whew, she somehow gets to her destination unharmed. I guess God saved her for a reason.

Not long after settling into a friend's apartment, Loretta answers the phone. She tells the unknown caller her name and the absent friend's name, and he runs with it. After a very brief exchange he says 'Tell me what you look like, Loretta'. For god's sake you know and I know and everybody and his dog would know from this that the caller's belt was already unbuckled and the phone shifted from his dominant hand to the other. Well, not everybody, perhaps. An Amish child not know but then an Amish child might noy know how to answer a telephone either. Loretta doesn't know, though. She continues the conversation, obliging him with the reply that yes, she is blonde and delighting him with the unprompted word-picture of herself just out of the bath and still undressed.

Finally the penny drops. And when it does oh no! whatever shall I do? I know, I'll get help! So she rings a friend on the other side of the country, another one in Washington DC, the NYC cops, and finally a helpline but no succor does she find. Loretta is a determined little woman though so she rings a telephone operator to complain. When speaking to her she uses the word 'bloody' and the offended operator replies, 'Keep it clean, ma'am'. Now, an Oxford lecturer in English is likely to know that very few Americans would have the faintest idea that 'bloody' was ever considered an obscenity. On the other hand, a pre-school teacher in Oxford mightn't, no matter how many Catherine Cookson books from the library she'd read . Or was this Smith's writerly way of telling us that the operator had watched My Fair Lady the previous night, no, scratch that, never mind.

What next. Oh yes, brave Loretta goes to a play. Alll by herself. During a conversation in the interval with the unappealing stranger next to her she tells him where she's staying whilst in New York,and where she could be found the next afternoon. O Loretta Loretta you just don't learn do you.

She leaves the theatre on page 31. I stopped reading on page 31. In expecting readers to take this sort of nonsense seriously Smith displays a complete lack of respect for them and I couldn't be bothered to bother with the bloody thing.

Londoner borrows NYC apt of friend and gets threatening phones calls. Fun read because the leading character goes to all the tourist spots in NYC. ( )