Leaving clues lying around

A reviewer has little or no real choice, alas. When he or she is asked to pick from a restricted list of new titles there is always a reviewer with faster mouse-clicking abilities who’s asked for it before. You just have to play “catch me if you can” with the author or book you most want to lay your hands on. In this case I was honestly just about to ask my Editors to spare me the misery of reading, let alone writing about, this piece of highly-predictable love fiction my younger sister would have turned her back on in her mid-teenage years. Yet a challenge I do cherish.

After all, Josephine Cox is currently recognised as one of the UK’s “favourite storytellers”, so persist I did.In the end, it turned out that Ms Cox has concocted a good, well-woven story that while it has all the ingredients of a Mills & Boon paperback every other girl would pick from the bookshop adjacent to the florist in any given city, it still somehow keeps the reader guessing; more often than not, though, guessing absolutely rightly.After a tragic and traumatic end to his mother’s life and the earlier disappearance of his father, young Davie flees his hometown of Blackburn, unsure of what the future holds for him.

Devastated, he must escape the haunting memories of the worst night in his young life. With little more than the shirt on his back and a fierce determination to find his father, he sets off on a lonely, friendless road. Back home, those Davie has left behind wait anxiously: Judy, his childhood friend who has held a secret close to her heart these past few years; and Joseph, his grandfather whose guilt at the events of that dreadful night burns right to his soul. They do not know whether they will ever see Davie ever again.

Eventually, after months of searching and with danger, including a police search for him in connection with a case of suspected murder, lurking at every turn, Davie finds a friend and a place. His hopes of finding peace, however, are short-lived when fate urges him to decide whether to keep running or go back and face his demons. There is no denying Ms Cox’s descriptive power. She also brings out the then still strong communal spirit in Blackburn and other Lancashire towns way back in England of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her characters come out brightly, thanks mainly to some very effective, well-timed use of the vernacular brush on her writing canvas.

Yet The Loner is not exactly a book of substance. There are too many foreseeable situations and Cox has the sometimes infuriating habit of giving open clues as to what is coming next, which other critics have rightly described as an insult to her readers’ intelligence