To The Last Page

As she demonstrated with her previous last novel, the phenomenally successful He Said/She Said , Erin Kelly is a master of sinister throwaway lines, little phrases and nuances dropped into seemingly everyday situations. The intentionally misleading opening scene in Stone Mothers of a blindfolded woman being driven in a car is quickly resolved when it turns out to be a surprise trip organised by her husband Sam, but an air of suspense and concern carries over. It’s not just that the surprise turns out to be an expensive apartment or that it was converted from an old asylum, but Marianne’s reaction suggests that the there is something else that is massively disturbing about Marianne’s return to the Nazareth Pauper Lunatic Asylum. You can quickly discount the idea that Marianne might once have been an inmate at Nazareth hospital, as the Victorian asylum has been closed down for a quite a while, the methods of such ‘stone mothers’ long ago called into question, government reforms and poli...