I rescued this psychological thriller from a lonely life on a coffee table in the front lobby of our apartment building after walking past it for several days. The author apparently has written a book a year for more than a decade, but I was not familiar with her work. Set in the recent past in Miami, the story is told in the first person singular present tense and only covers a few months following the brutal assault and rape of the narrator by an unknown assailant.
It cannot be easy to make a story about a rape into an enjoyable read, but Fielding has done just that. The reader follows the victim into a world of increasingly bizarre panic attacks and wallowing in pathetic self-pity, and then a state of paranoid psychosis, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, nightmare from dreams. She sees characteristics of her assailant in almost every man she encounters, and becomes a recluse. There is the usual clutch of feuding, estranged, and weird family members that seem to make regular appearances in the such novels, and these are indeed colourful and entertaining, even if also scheming, unreliable and unhelpful. The cast of characters is not very extensive and they are easy to distinguish from one another. It seems that the search for the rapist has been fruitless and abandoned until three pages from the end when he is captured wherein all of the false leads and loose ends are wrapped up and suddenly it all makes sense. Readers who keep looking ahead to the last lines will be convinced that the author cannot wrap it up satisfactorily in the space left.
There are some exaggerated and impossible descriptions of actions (the rapist must have four hands to do what’s described at the scene of the attack). The the physiological accompaniments of panic and anxiety attacks as described occur only in novels. Arm veins do not swell and pulsate in response to anxiety, for example. And Fielding perpetuates the popular myth that rape is all about power and has nothing to do with sex. But, as men all know, rape without sexual arousal is impossible, so this is at best only a half truth.
I think that women who have been sexually assaulted will be able to relate to the psychological devastation described here better than any man, but whether or not they could enjoy reading this is a different matter. Perhaps the thrill of the hunt for the criminal and the surprising twists are what makes this whole genre appealing to many readers, with the nature of the offence being largely irrelevant. But I only like thrillers in small doses and will not be hunting for more from this author.
The Passionate Reader 