Penny Hancock

File under "London Gothic" and "Psychological Thriller". And perhaps also "Lolita Variations". Sonia is a fortysomething married professional in London living in the River House, a large house on the Thames. Her daughter is away at college, and her husband spends most of his time traveling, leaving her alone. One afternoon the 15 year old nephew of Sonia's good friend Helen comes by asking to borrow a hard-to-find album her husband owns. Sonia invites Jez in, and his presence quickly show more enflames past trauma, leading her to kidnap him.

As Humbert Humbert found in the girl-child Lolita the satisfying filler for an ache and passion he identifies as caused by the death of a childhood sweetheart, so Sonia finds in Jez the filler for a similar ache and trauma caused by the death of her own childhood passion, Seb. Unlike Humbert, Sonia does not seek sex in this situation; though she does admire his physical form, she primarily wants his emotional dependence. She wants him to enjoy being with her and to depend on her for his care. Though she deludes herself as to what she is actually doing to Jez, she is still aware enough to know that she needs to restrain him, though she tells herself that once she wins his trust, that will cease being necessary.

The setting of the novel plays a significant and satisfying role. The river Thames around the London neighborhood of Greenwich looms large in Sonia's psychology and events, both in the current day and in flashbacks to her youth. Much attention is given to the tides, currents, smells, activity, and character of the river, making it really one of the central characters.

Certainly a very satisfying debut novel. show less

Kept in the Dark is British author Penny Hancock's debut novel.

Forty something Sonia lives in a beautiful home on the Thames River in England. She is being pressured by her family to sell the house now that her children are grown, but she is quite resistant to this idea. Their constant pressure seems to have widened a crack in Sonia's psyche.

Fifteen year old Jez comes to the door of River House to take up an offer from Sonia's husband to borrow some music. He's not home, but Sonia invites show more him in anyway......and decides that he won't be leaving. He is a beautiful boy and she decides she will be the one to protect him and keep him safe. So she drugs him and locks him in the music room.....

All of this happens within the first few chapters of the book. So, we know the crime early on. The question is will Jez escape? And why is Sonia doing this? We get little glimpses into her past as the book progresses, revealing more and more of a relationship that was distinctly unhealthy.

What drove this book for me was Sonia's rationalizations and thought processes. Hancock has written wonderful dialogue for Sonia. She is able to completely twist the situation around in her mind - she is truly only doing her best to help this poor boy - completely obliterating the fact that she is the one putting him in danger. She can't understand why Jez is not more grateful. The crime Sonia has committed is horrifying, but is Sonia herself who is gave me that creepy, unsettled feeling in my stomach as I read. There is a twist at the end, that I did suspect was coming a few chapters before.

Hancock employs a first person narration style for Kept in the Dark. It's unusual as the entire book is told from the criminal's point of view and we never really get to know the victim at all. We know Jez wants to escape, but only from what Sonia tells us. Readers looking for an action packed book won't find it here. Instead the book moves at a slower pace as Hancock deliberately and deliciously builds the story bit by bit.

Hancock has penned an interesting debut. I would pick up another book by this author - her next is scheduled for the first half of 2013. show less

I purchased this novel just going by the strength on some of its earlier reviews and I have to say that I'm very glad I did. I'm on a bit of a psychological thriller kick at the moment and this was an excellent piece of fiction that I became absorbed in, very quickly. For me, a good thriller has to be intense and really hold the readers attention and I found this utterly compelling, able to visualise everything that was going on, from the characters to the settings.

The novel follows show more forty-something Sonia, who one day opens the door to find fifteen-year-old Jez on her doorstep, there to borrow an album, promised to him by Sonia's husband. Chillingly, Sonia then decides that she is not going to let Jez leave and imprisons him in her home, hiding him from the world. At the same time, the book alludes to traumatic events that happened to Sonia years previously, something to do with the haunting river on which she still lives...

This was a book of great depths, encompassing a lot of issues including family rivalries, breaking marriages and childhood traumas, though it never felt clunky or overdone, with convincing dialogue and just the right pace to keep the reader interested with a few little twists and turns.

I personally felt that this novel worked so well because of how everything was unravelled so slowly with only vague hints to Sonia's past as well as how she tries to keep such a sense of normality about things in the present, despite knowing what she had done/was doing. It adds a sense of eerie believability to things as well as a heightened sense of anticipation from the reader. Also, as the reader sees a lot of the story in Sonia's own narrative, they obviously understand that she is a very unhinged individual, making her all the more frightening because you cannot perceive how she is going to act next. She clearly knows that what she is doing is wrong, but tries to justify her actions on a very disturbed level. I have to say that despite her wrongs, I did feel for her- she is clearly mentally ill and I think the author also manages to illicit some degree of sympathy for what she has been through, which is no mean feat. She is a very complex character and therefore a really memorable protagonist- because she comes across as an ordinary, every day lady, especially in how she appears to the outside world (think Kathy Bates in `Misery').

I have deducted a star, merely because I found the way Aunt Helen's character was represented to be a bit irritating and she grated on me a bit. She was completely self-absorbed and I did not like her at all. Overall though, this was a very well written psychological thriller made all the more exciting by the fact that this is only a debut novel. I genuinely can't wait to see what Hancock comes up with next and I really appreciated how unlike a lot of thrillers, she did look at the psychological motivation as to why her characters did the things they did.

Highly recommended- make sure you don't miss this.

*This review also appears on Amazon.co.uk* show less

This is a beautifully-written but very strange little book. It's utterly absorbing but in the end rather unsatisfying, prevented by the unreliability of its own narrator from ever making it clear to the reader what exactly happened. Although the flaws, such as a major plot point hastily revealed late in the story and never fully addressed, aren't fatal, they are distracting. But Hancock does an excellent job of pulling you in on the narrator's side against the other people in her life before show more she she reveals the narrator's madness, as it were, and it's that well-done bit that keeps the reader hoping that things won't end badly for her. Not perfect, but well worth a read, just to see how that's done. show less