Product Description

The 1980s. Kate Meaney - with her 'Top Secret' notebook and
Mickey her toy monkey - is busy being a junior detective. She observes
goings-on and follows 'suspects' at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping
centre and in her street, where she is friends with the newsagent's son,
Adrian. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears,
Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.

Then, in 2004, Adrian's sister Lisa - stuck in a going-nowhere relationship
- is working as a deputy manager at Your Music, a cut-price record store.
Every day she tears her hair out at the horribly bizarre behaviour of her
customers and colleagues. But together with security guard Kurt, she
becomes entranced by the little girl they keep glimpsing on the centre's
CCTV. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, they investigate how
these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks
itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Guardian
'An exceptional, polyphonic novel of urban disaffection, written
with humour and pathos'

Daily Mail
'A superb, haunting novel from a new literary talent'

Jonathan Coe
'Skewers our consumer society in all its absurdity and terrible
sadness. A great debut novel from an awesomely talented writer'

Customer Reviews

what was a great book
The first part of this book is absolutely brilliant, because we're following in the footsteps of would-be detective Kate Meaney and her sidekick stuffed monkey and both are charming, quirky, funny heroes and we really care about what happens to them. Then we jump forward 20 years, to the shopping mall which is the gloomy, ghostly, cavernous entity at the centre of the book. Bereaved security guard, Kurt, sees a small girl on the camera late at night, and he and his tentative new friend Lisa, set out to find the truth about the child. I actually liked both Kurt and Lisa, I thought they were rounded characters, but the book does drag in the middle. The suspense we feel the first time Kurt sees Kate on the camera just isn't sustained and there's no particular reason for the ghost to be there. The mystery of Kate's disappearance is solved, but nothing really changes.

There are also rather a lot of coincidences and people forget really important things and then remember them when its convenient to the plot.

I really, really enjoyed reading this book, but when I reached the end and thought about it, I felt a little let down. It's not a five-star read, but I would have given it four-and-a-half if I could!

Average
The premise of the book is an original one, starting with a young girl and a shopping mall. The book starts strongly but you are let down in the middle and I felt the book did not pick up again until right at the end of the story when all is revealed.

I felt the characters were a bit flimsy and it was not a book that I really, really wanted to read or one of those books that you can't put down. The book is easy to read and because the story and plot are very different to the majority of books I would recommend borrowing it from someone you know or a library but I am unsure if it is worth purachasing.

"It was going to be a truly hellish day at Your Music"
Hmmm. This would smell of "first novel" to me even if this wasn't advertised all over the front cover. How can I tell? you ask wide eyed. Perhaps it's the heavy reliance on personal experience (the sweet shop, the early eighties primary school, the shopping centre), perhaps it's the switch from one writing style to another to showcase that the author has Technique, perhaps it's the heavy editing which always, always shows, just like the alterations on a cheap suit, perhaps it's the use of the ghost story, a standard support for flimsy plots and a favourite of the aspiring scribbler, because so many of us got hooked on reading through that particular genre.

Having said all that, it's a decent enough, if wildly overpraised first attempt. A lonely young girl, whose diaries we read at the beginning of the book, fantasises about being a private eye and spends time at the recently constructed local shopping centre pretending to solve crime. One day, she disappears. Twenty years later, her disappearance is still unsolved, but her image appears on the CCTV of the same shopping centre, pulling a security guard and a shop assistant into reinvestigating what really happened years ago. There are a couple of fairly predictable plot twists and that's about it.

Thematically, O'Flynn is going for a critique of consumer culture, the point so brilliantly captured by the zombies staggering around the mall in Romero's "Dawn of the Dead". Shopping makes ghosts of us all. The trouble is that the fate of the girl and the journey of the characters has no relationship to that theme, so the exercise becomes as empty as the night time corridors of the Green Oaks Centre and left me with the unsatisfied feeling a whole day shopping for things I don't really need gives me.