I read this book one Sunday morning in bed and couldn't get up until I had it finished - it was compelling, disturbing and had the sneaky knack of being well-written and interesting enough, before all the nasty stuff started.
It's very funny and sharp about the habits and patterns of friendships and relationships which gradually become fossilised into place. In Alice Loudon, it has an appealing narrator who is constantly measuring her life and loves. But then Alice falls into an obsessive affair and locks herself out of her old life. Her new lover is a professional mountaineer who had been a guide on a supposedly foolproof scam taking the filthy rich up a Himalayan peak for lots of money.
The expedition ended in disaster and five deaths, and Adam became a reluctant media hero for having saved the lives of all the other clients and climbers. This is an axis around which the novel turns and returns as Alice, who occupies more everyday altitudes, tries to get inside the experience through Adam (who refuses to discuss it), his friends, a book written by one of the other mountaineers, and a journalist who interviews Adam.
There is a prelude which shows one of the clients dying of exposure on Chungawat, but otherwise the extraordinary world of high climbers is made accessible by being filtered through the curious mind of interesting but ordinary Alice.
The disturbing part of the novel is its exploration of sexual violence and violent sex. This is not made simple by any means and its capacity to horrify and upset is an indication that it is convincing. Alice tries to make sense of her own emotions and reactions but is gradually drawn into some blurry region where pleasure and pain, love and abuse cannot be distinguished.
Her experience and reactions are contrasted with that of other women she learns about, and thrown into relief by the occasional contact she makes with people inhabiting the ordinary world. More traditional aspects of the genre are represented by the statutory mutilated pet (turned inside out, if you don't mind), a stalker or two, rooting through rubbish for unlikely clues, and that feeling of begging the curious Alice to pry no further (this may have been shouted aloud once or twice on that same Sunday morning).
Of course, there was also the usual fun of trying to stay one step ahead of the discoveries. It's a book you're glad to finish but that shouldn't take away from the skill and range of the writing of its authors (the married couple Nicci Gerrard and Sean French ) and their unflinching determination to look into a terrifying area of the human psyche - an uncomfortable read from chapter three onwards, in the best sense.
Anna Johnston is a teacher and critic