Product Description

Kit Quinn is a young woman who inhabits dangerous worlds: crime scenes, interrogation scenes, hospitals for the criminally insane. Horribly wounded in an attack by a suspect, she must return to the site of her worst fears. She is asked by the policeto advise them on a simple murder inquiry. A young runaway has been found killed by a canal and the chief suspect is the man who wounded Kit. But Kit refuses to accept appearances and her obsessive search for the truth draws her into an underworld of the missing and the unloved which puts her at terrible risk.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #168021 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Many are the writers who tackle the field of the psychological thriller, but few create such a dark and compelling world as Nicci French. The Red Room inhabits the same sinister universe as such previous thrillers as The Memory Game and the book that many consider to be her finest to date, Killing Me Softly. French is concerned with the unstable surface of reality and the malign undercurrents of human behaviour forever threatening to disrupt the tenuous happiness of her characters. In The Red Room, her particular priority is the queasy attraction of the forbidden and the terrifying.

Kit Quinn has a job that many would find too disturbing to tackle. Her beat is the world of crime scenes, hospitals for the criminally insane, the grimmer prisons. In her latest assignment, colleagues in the police ask for her help in what initially appears to be a straightforward murder inquiry, in which a youthful runaway has been killed near a London canal. At first, the evidence points to the killer being a man who wounded the murdered young woman, but Kit has learned that the appearance of things in a deceptive world may not be trusted. As she descends deeper and deeper into a brutal underworld of lost and exploited youngsters, she finds herself as at risk as the young victims she is dealing with.

What makes this more than a conventional thriller is the author's fastidious examination of her heroine's tortured psyche. Kate has suffered terrible wounds in a savage attack, and there is something unhealthy about her immersion in the kind of life that left her with terrible scars. French is particularly sharp on her efforts to push her life back into some kind of conventional order. The Red Room has the customary dangerous voyage to the centre of a mystery that is par for the course for the genre, but this is also a study of the troubled psyche of a damaged heroine, and her dark world view:

Beware of beautiful days. Bad things happen on beautiful days. It may be that when you get happy, you get careless. Beware of having a plan. Your gaze is focused on the plan, and that's the moment when things start happening just outside your range of vision ...

--Barry Forshaw

Review
Psychologist Kit Quinn inhabits crime scenes, interrogation rooms and hospitals for the criminally insane. Horribly scarred in an attack by a suspect she is asked by the police to help in a murder enquiry and the chief suspect is the man who wounded her.But she refuses to accept appearances and her obsessive search for the truth draws her into the dangerous underworld of the missing and the unloved.

About the Author
Nicci French is a journalist and lives in London. THE RED ROOM is her fourth novel.

Customer Reviews

Really disappointing
Killing Me Softly was a fantastic book and got me hooked on Nicci French. Beneath the Skin, The Safe House and particularly the Memory Game were all brilliant too, so I had no doubts about rushing out to buy The Red Room. Unfortunately, The protaganist, Kit, has the depth of a puddle and there is no drama or real intreague until the last few pages. The previous books had me sneaking to the toilet at work just to read a bit more, but with the Red Room I was tempted to give up, when after three quarters of the book, absolutely nothing had happened. Trust me, Killing Me Softly or The Memory Game are the great books Nicci French should be remembered for. This one should be buried....

First-rate crime story
I'm a big fan of Nicci French (the non de plume of a husband-and-wife team) and had been looking forward to The Red Room for quite some time. Her previous titles have all been chilling page-turners, but this one was slightly disappointing. While the story was well written with first class characterisation and a satisfying surprise ending, I didn't feel it was quite as gripping as The Memory Game, The Safe House or the superb Killing Me Softly. But this is a minor quibble. All in all, the novel is a first-rate crime story in which Dr Kate Quinn, recovering from a traumatic attack, helps the police with the investigation into the murder of a young homeless woman. The prime suspect, a creepy and pathetic no-hoper, is the very same man who attacked Kate. But she feels that he is innocent of this murder and does all in her power to prove that she is right.

Nicci French at her best
Having read killing me softly and beneath the skin I took this on holiday and couldn't put it down. The plot has many twists and leaves you guessing until the last few pages. I would love to see Dr Kitt Quinn in other stories as I loved her wit and personality. A must for any avid thriller reader.