The Kindness of Strangers
The Kindness of Strangers is part historical fiction, part murder-mystery and has just a sprinkling of melodrama. About two too many plot strands are neatly tied up by its end, as though Garman couldn’t resist a few final flourishes. But such indulgence is forgivable when a book is this vivid and entertaining, and powered by such a wonderfully dry wit.
This is not only an excellent mystery, but an evocative portrayal of a group of people displaced socially and geographically by war and its aftermath, with the moral and topographical landscape of 1950s London superbly rendered.
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An intriguingly tricksy story ... The 1953 setting is perfectly realised by Garman, with smoky, boisterous pubs and down-at-heel drawing rooms. Her vivid characters find themselves at the mercy of old-fashioned ideas that compress their lives into clandestine shapes.
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