My 100th review and I’ve been mulling this over for a few weeks. I’m an admirer of indy author, Jane Davis’ work, so much so that I bought my Kindle copy in advance and looked forward to the launch. The author’s customary style is again deployed to good effect and the narrative is engaging and draws the reader into the respective experiences and feelings of the characters, but I think herein lies my difficulty and I stress it is my problem.

The story-lines centre on the aftermath of a major incident at a London underground station (St. Boltoph and Old Billingsgate), in which fifty nine people lost their lives. “For over thirteen years the search for truth – for the undoing of injustice – has eaten up everything. Marriage, friendships, family, health, career, finances.” Such a devastating, albeit fictional, loss of life is clearly fertile territory to examine the sense of loss, anger and despair of those bereaved family and friends left to mourn and the aching instinct for answers (‘why’?), accountability and the public vilifying of the blameworthy.

Unfortunately, this fictional account of a disaster, in which so many perished, has coincided with such an array of actual disasters, still etched in the public consciousness and pored over in the media that we are, sadly perhaps, all too familiar with the post disaster landscape (Grenfell fire; Manchester bombing; Hillsborough; 7/7; 9/11). I’m not suggesting that a novel is an inappropriate platform for exploring the human response to sudden catastrophic loss and the enduring impact that ripples outward. It just seems to me to be an emotional devastation, which may lack appeal if the reader is seeking ‘entertainment’, or an escape from ‘reality’. Though here I should probably record a ‘conflict of interests’, in that having trained as a crisis support worker for such eventualities, it is difficult not to read this book through a professional lens.

In any event, this ambitious book is very well written and the respective discoveries and cathartic journeys of the key bereaved characters are also cleverly offset by the experience of Eric, a law student who comes without the emotional baggage of those directly affected, but nonetheless is grounded in his own life’s challenges. Naturally the experiences of surviving partners, parents, siblings, and friends will be different and Davis handles this diversity well via the delicate parallel plotlines. In some senses the one ‘unknown victim’ is the saddest of all. However, while the toing and froing, pre and post- incident and across the multiple perspectives does confer a certain fragmentation within the storytelling, the narrative is successfully woven to a satisfactory conclusion.

On balance, I think Jane Davis pitches the tone about right. Not so bleak as to trigger compassion fatigue, but not so sanitized as to run the risk of appearing implausible. Fortunately perhaps, most of us can overlook the licence granted to the fiction writer, to fashion an interesting account and Davis has certainly made good on a tricky theme. For me, it’s proved a bit too much like a busman’s holiday, but I acknowledge I don’t have a neutral perspective and shall ponder other reviews to get a more balanced view. That the author should tread here at all does her much credit.