This is a study of erotic obsession written in tones so dispassionate as to make it doubly disturbing. The story of Stella, the wife of the superintendent of a remote hospital for the criminally insane, who becomes involved with one of the patients, is narrated by a clinical psychologist whose tone of genial impartiality is maintained almost to the end of the book; the reader is similarly manipulated, for Mc Grath's smooth prose slips by with deceptive ease, until suddenly you find yourself embroiled in an emotional mess which clings to the mind like superglue, long after the last page has been quietly turned. Unsettling would be an understatement.
By Arminta Wallace