It starts when Sam Galen skids on an icy road in South Wales and sends his car over a precipice. Among the other motorists delayed by the accident is Sarah Fort, who is driving her son, Patrick, to a university interview in Cardiff. As their car halts at the scene, Patrick gets out to look over the abyss to the smoking car below. Is the driver dead, he asks the police, who give him and the other rubberneckers short shrift.
But Patrick is interested in death. When he was only seven, his father died in a car accident. And with Patrick on the autism spectrum, interested means obsessed.
But back to Sam Galen. He survives the crash but ends up in the coma ward at Cardiff. There, one of the nurses is Tracy Evans, not so much an angel of mercy as a mercenary angel on the look out for a rich husband, not necessarily her own.
The three storylines pan out. Sam’s is in the first person, a nerve-wracking account of an active mind in an unresponsive body. He sees things, bad things, but cannot report them. Tracy, who maybe should have noticed Sam’s attempts to communicate, has her focus elsewhere – on romantic novels, the boxes of chocolates from grateful relatives, and on the potentially widowed husbands.
Patrick too ends up in hospital, hoping that a course in the dissecting room will answer his questions about death and what comes after. He even manages to overcome his distaste of company to mix, if not socialise, with his fellow medical students and flat mates.
The book whizzes along with pithy prose and OMG inducing twists and turns. Incidents require police involvement, and a new character, DS Emrys Williams emerges and begins to knit together the plot strands. It all leads to a fine conclusion (for some if not all).
An excellent read;
bring on more Belinda Bauer!
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