Review: The Next Girl by Pip Drysdale

Pip Drysdale's latest novel The Next Girl is a finely turned psychological thriller about a paralegal who takes the law into her own hands, taking on a truly dangerous man in the process. Billie Spencer-Tate thought she was doing the right thing by encouraging a woman to give evidence at trial. When it all goes spectacularly wrong, Dr Samuel Grange, a truly dangerous man, is free to harm more women. When Billie is fired from her job she vows to find a way to stop him from harming the next girl. And the most foolproof way to do just that is for Billie to become the next girl. Is she in too deep? Or is there much more to Billie that meets the eye ... 

The Next Girl is an enjoyable thriller about a woman whose life has been shattered and shaped in the cruelest of ways. Billie finds solace in taking the law into her own hands, targeting those who have caused the greatest of harm to others and the results are truly jaw dropping. Of course, a number of complexities arise from the situation. There are relationship complications, things that she cannot easily explain to those closest to her. Not everybody likes Billie's form of justice, and she finds herself in any number of scrapes as the lines between what is legal and what is moral become increasingly blurred. The author cleverly leaves it to the reader to make up their own mind about what Billie has done, her state of mind and whether or not her actions are as noble as she believes them to be. There are also some interesting analogies between her behaviour and addition that work perfectly within the context of the story.

Faced paced and well written The Next Girl had me gripped from the first page. I loved this one so much that within twenty-four hours I had purchased two more titles by the author.

Highly recommended.

Ps I also loved the Spotify playlist the goes with the book. See the QR code at the back for details.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my review copy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more