2018/57: Weirdo -- Cathi Unsworth

"I was there ... I saw everything ... But unlike everyone else you're chasing after, nobody saw me." [p. 153]

Weirdo switches between 2003, when private detective Sean Ward visits an infamous murderer at a secure facility in East Anglia, and 1984, when the youth of a (fictional) Norfolk seaside town run wild one summer. New forensic evidence indicates that the 'Wicked Witch of the East', the teenaged murderess Corinne, may not have acted alone. Ward would like to clear her name, if he can: but discovering the truth about the events of that distant summer is not an easy task.

Bad things start to happen when glamorous Samantha arrives from London. Corinne draws away from her old friend Debbie as she's dragged into Sam's lies and deceptions. She's not the only one affected, but various parents and grandparents are (mostly) convinced by Sam's charm, and her influence goes unchecked and unnoticed -- until Corinne and her friend Noj resort to desperate measures in an attempt to banish Sam.

The town of Ernemouth is far from idyllic. There's corruption everywhere in Ernemouth. Though Corinne may be innocent in some ways she is tarnished in others, helpless in the face of her mother's greed and amorality, growing up fatherless (though when the identity of her absent father is revealed, being fatherless might be the better option). Corinne's contemporaries, as teenagers or as adults, maintain a consensus of secrets and distractions -- as does the author. (I can't think, offhand, of another novel where the identity of the murder victim is as much, or more, of a mystery than the identity of the murderer.)

(Come to think of it, many characters in this novel have secret identities, or secret connections: ties of blood, of marriage, of loyalty. There's a lot of hiding in plain sight.)

Ernemouth in 1984 is horrifically credible. I remember Norfolk in the mid-eighties, though happily not from a small-town perspective: Corinne and Debbie's trips to Norwich ('bought a load of records in Backs and seen a really cool pair of boots in the shop at the bottom of Elm Hill that Debbie was determined to save up for. Had chips on the Haymarket and half a cider in The Murderers' [p. 80]) might as well be lifted from my diary. The sheer claustrophobia of the town and its people is as horrific as the events that lead to Corinne's conviction -- and the events of the same summer that go unpunished. This is a bleak and compelling novel, dealing with toxic friendships and with a touch of what might be real magic, and the 1984 narrative in particular is tremendously evocative.