Freezing

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Evans is a young London writer and lawyer with a distinct knack for macabre chills. Her new book, after The Last Girl (1997), takes as its improbable hero narrator Stewart Park, an abject stutterer of weird appearance who lives in a fantasy world of his own and works as a photographer in a morgue. Into the morgue one cold night comes the body of a lovely young woman drowned in the Thames, and Stewart, obsessed with the image of her frozen beauty, resolves to find out who she is and what happened to her. He has plenty of problems of his own in one of those gothic slum households beloved of contemporary English writers: his aging father is an eccentric who may also be a child molester; his angry sister gravitates to bullying men who mistreat her two appealing small sons; and his only comfort seems to be a computer game he has devised. Stewart's search for the dead girl's identity breaks him out of his fantasy shell but also places him in terrible dangerand, in a frightful climactic moment, forces him to come to terms with the specter that has haunted his own unhappy family. Evans's grasp of Stewart's macabre world is sure, and his strange workmates at the morgue are wonderfully characterized. It is only in the real-life machinations that led to the drowned girl's death and in the remorseless pursuit of Stewart by some rather dimly motivated thugs that the plot machinery gets a little creaky. Still, for its gripping atmosphere and a truly original protagonist, Evans's book is a winner. (July)

Library Journal

First published in Britain, this moody, psychological portrait reveals one Stewart Park, an introverted hospital morgue photographer. In addition to being socially maladroit, Stewart suffers from an incapacitating stammer, a strange father, and an even stranger sister with two cowering little boys. Obsessed with discovering the identity of a young Jane Doe, he winds up a suspect himself. Stewart persists, slowly unraveling "Jane's" death while also exposing defects at home--and a cause for the stammering. A stately but enticing pace, weird perspective, and unusual "sleuth" recommend this to most collections.

Kirkus Reviews

A lonely morgue photographer's fixation on a late client unleashes madness and violence. But not before Evans (The Last Girl, 1996) takes the time to turn the temperature down well below zero in Stewart Park's little world. Stewart isn't just your ordinary morgue attendant; physically ugly and cursed with a crippling stutter, he'd be a social outcast even if he worked on a movie set. When he goes home from his cheerless workplace, it's to cross swords with his sister Mary (who talks to him only to say she's leaving her two little boys with him again), with his senile father (who seems to live for the moment when Stewart will absent-mindedly leave his bedroom door unlocked so he can sneak inside and paw through Stewart's things), orþin the happiest moments of his pitiful lifeþto play the computer-game nemesis called Dustraiser. The best-adjusted attendant at the morgue abruptly gets sacked; Mary, who's taken up with a new man who leaves her and the boys bruised, refuses to leave Lee and Lenny alone with her father; Stewart, who's been invited to his mate's engagement party only so he can photograph the happy couple, never thinks to bring his camera. Into this quietly hellish orbitþthink of Polanski's film Repulsionþspins an unknown dead woman whose face haunts Stewart so powerfully that he takes the photograph of her home so it'll be the first thing he sees each morning and the last thing before sleep each night. The mood is already so grim that it's clear this latest obsession can lead to no good, yet Evans patiently piles on the menace until Stewart finds himself in the middle of a criminal plot that, oddly enough, seems less scarifying than the bleakly andbelievably normal existence it interrupts. "There's nothing like words for separating the living and the dead," opines Stewart. Maybe, but meanwhile Evans uses every word of her novel to immerse its mousy hero more deeply into his death-in-life.