I wouldn’t recommend Martina Cole’s Faceless [ISBN 978 – 0-7553-3753-8] to anyone wanting cheering up or generally lifting – the jacket blub says her book is about ”violence and corruption” and “the shady criminal underworld – a setting she is fast making her own”. What this doesn’t say is that the characters are the most unpleasant lot you have ever had portrayed in a novel. Rather, the women are all nasty, sleazy, obnoxious bullies, whose families hate them (and we can see why) and the men are equally repulsive, but as they are the bullied and badly-done to, are allowed a glimmer or two of nearly human behaviour. I didn’t care a jot about any of them. In fact, I don’t know why I bothered to finish it.
I wouldn’t recommend Martina Cole’s Faceless [ISBN 978 – 0-7553-3753-8] to anyone wanting cheering up or generally lifting – the jacket blub says her book is about ”violence and corruption” and “the shady criminal underworld – a setting she is fast making her own”. What this doesn’t say is that the characters are the most unpleasant lot you have ever had portrayed in a novel. Rather, the women are all nasty, sleazy, obnoxious bullies, whose families hate them (and we can see why) and the men are equally repulsive, but as they are the bullied and badly-done to, are allowed a glimmer or two of nearly human behaviour. I didn’t care a jot about any of them. In fact, I don’t know why I bothered to finish it. Having said that, the book conveys the atmosphere she clearly wanted.
Ex drug addict and prostitute Marie Carter is just out of prison after her conviction for killing her two best friends 11 years ago , she has nowhere to go. She does find a job and tries to track down her two children and finds her daughter living with her ex-pimp, the father of her son – what’s more she has a child by him and he is training her upon drugs just like her mother. The book is not set for a happy ending, and indeed there isn’t one.
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