WAITING FOR WEDNESDAY

Oh my! Another four days of the week to go, as this one follows Blue Monday and Tuesdays’ Gone. Not that there is anything wrong with this “weekdays” series by the famous husband wife team - Wednesday is just so busy we felt exhausted for psychotherapist heroine Frieda Klein. There was so much rushing about the length of the Northern Line that this reviewer felt lost and bewildered despite herself spending hours reading crime novels while travelling the Northern Line between Charing Cross and Woodside Park.

The story within Waiting has Frieda, a psychotherapist in London, drawn in from two separate directions to the murder in her own home of one Ruth Lennox. On the one hand, Frieda is friends with investigating officer Malcolm Karlssson and on the other, her niece Chloe is a pal of Lennox’s son, Ted.

Poor lass not enough that she is pulled into this puzzle following a seriously traumatic incident in Tuesday Frieda is dealing with a transatlantic love affair and her own private practice. Despite all of this, she somehow finds time to help the police.

Oh and go to New York to visit the boyfriend.

And look after a cat and the niece.

Talk about I don’t know how she does it all.

Anyhow, the unravelling of the Lennox murder is one top plot strand. As is a retired reporter named Jim Fearby helping one wrongly convicted George Conley clear his name. Strand number three – which for this reviewer – really did not fit well with the other two – involves faux psychiatric patients. Yep people who apparently have sufficient time and money on their hands to visit psychotherapists even though they are supposedly well to sic out phoney head shrinkers. It was not an uninteresting plot – it seemed a pity that the dispatching of poor old Ruth Lennox,  in gruesome and mysterious fashion, was on a par with that plot line in which none of the participants ends up dead.

Wednesday is a fun book for lovers of London, and Frieda is an interesting character, well-rounded and not as dreary and humour deprived as some single lady private detectives of current crime fiction. We just hope Thursday focuses a bit more tightly on the traditional whodunit element so we can all get to Friday without being utterly exhausted.