‘Surface Tension’ by Joanna Hines

Published by Simon & Schuster,
4 March 2002. 
ISBN: 978-0-68486053-4 (HB)

For Carol Ridley, the arrival of her husband’s neice, Jenny is not any great events, and she does her best to welcome the prickly girl, the daughter of her husband’s half sister who has for the last 20 years made her home in Australia. But Jenny is the catalyst that stirs up events of that long hot summer of 1976, when six friends shared an idyllic time at Grays Orchard, the home inherited by Gus Ridley and his half sister Harriet, but which idyll eventually came to an end when one of the frends is brutally murdered.

Gus Ridley is renowned for the series of paintings he did that summer and although still a highly rated artist has never quite fulfilled the promise of those early paintings. Until the arrival of Jenny, Carol had been content to ignore the past as her husband never speaks of it or sees any of his old friends. But slowly Carol begins to question the silence surrounding the murder which has never been totally resolved. When Gus’s paintings are vandalised, Carol takes positive steps to find the answers that she is sure lie in the past. However, her quest takes her to a sinister cult run by one of the friends of that long hot summer, who has taken a vow of silence.   Whist insinuating herself into the cult Carol teams up with Tim who is desperately trying to extract his mother and son from the cult.

Although the book is set in the present day, the overriding feeling is of that long summer of 1976. One of my favourite books is A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell, which is also set in summer of 1976.

Joanna Hines first came to my attention with her book Improvising Carla. She is masterly at creating a chilling atmosphere of menace and suspense. And with Surface Tension, she has again created a gripping psychological thriller.    Highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Lizzie Hayes

Joanna Hines was born in London. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford.  She has published a number of acclaimed novels, including Improvising Carla which was dramatised for UK television.