Tangled Web  Tangled Web UK Review File Updated: 14/11/98The Locust Farm by Jeremy Dronfield Imagine Psycho meeting Wuthering Heights, and you get some idea of the atmosphere of this extraordinary novel. Carole Perceval lives in a remote Yorkshire farm, sheltering from her own past. One stormy evening a stranger turns up, a man who claims to have lost his memory. The story explode from there, diving to and fro among a tangle of apparently unrelated narrative threads. It has to be said that this tangle is never satisfactorily resolved, not unless coincidence and implausibility and narrative gerrymandering can be counted as sources of satisfaction. Another problem is that the prose shows a tendency to overheat, producing sentences like “legs keep trudging - vacuous inertia dragging at the drained muscles”. Vacuous inertia? This sort of language is the literary equivalent of monosodium glutamate: it blasts the critical tastebuds but fails to enhance the flavour. It doesn’t do much for the meaning, either. And yet, and yet. This novel richly deserved the accolade of being shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger of 1998. Dronfield is an ambitious and gifted writer. He takes the gothic thriller by the scruff of its neck and gives it a damned good shaking. THE LOCUST FARM is full of strong, striking characters. There is much powerful writing. Dronfield says, and implies, many interesting things about questions of identity and guilt. This may be a flawed novel, but it is also one to be proud of. When the author has devoted more thought to plot, narrative and the relationship between them, there is every chance that he will develop into a crime novelist of distinction. I look forward to his next book. ( Andrew Taylor ) Tangled Web  Tangled Web UK Review September 1998 File Updated: 30/03/00The Locust Farm by Jeremy Dronfield Carole Perceval ran away from the horrors in her past to a remote Yorkshire smallholding. But the process of healing is disrupted by a storm that brings a stranger to her door. In the resulting confusion she shoots him, but not fatally. That may have been her first mistake. As the man's body heals, she discovers his mind carries a deeper scar, a wound that has erased all memories of his past. Determined to find her own redemption through his, Carole assumes the mission of uncovering his dark secrets, particularly who he is fleeing and why. She finds herself enmeshed in the nightmare twists and turns of a double history as complex as the DNA helix before finally understanding that the past is inescapable. And unlike its victims, it never dies. Back in the 1930s, the Detection Club evolved a series of rules for the mystery. This novel breaks one of the cardinal rules and instead of proving itself the glorious exception, it confirms the reason for the rule in the first place. Nevertheless Jeremy Dronfield's debut is a tense page-turner that provides more than its fair share of surprises along the way. Dodging between serial killer thriller, psychological suspense and full-on action drama, its only fault is that the complications of the ending become confusing. ( Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill) | 
