Eileen Merriman is delightful. I shared accommodation with her at a book festival last year and we sat by the fire in the evenings drinking wine and chatting about writing, YA books, families, life. I should have locked my door.
Turns out one part of her extraordinarily busy mind was on her next book, plotting the way a woman might fall from a window (my room was on the first floor), choke holds and strangulations, drugs to put you to sleep, jealousy, manipulation, madness. Luckily the story, The Night She Fell, is about university students in Dunedin and not death at a lit fest. She does tend to write what she knows.
This, her latest very readable novel for adults, concerns the high pressured life of medical and law students. Eileen’s been there. The characters, the language, the setting are all very convincing. If Ronnie tells us that the temazepan she’s given a flatmate will reduce her sex drive and take the edge off her intellect and you can’t kill someone with LSD (comes in colourful squares, each decorated with a dancing elephant), while Home and Away screens in the background, I really feel I’ve got a window into a student flat.
This is a whodunnit/whydunnit. I won’t reveal the plot. It comes down to smart kids making poor choices, which is an excellent premise for a story. There’s plenty of dodgy behaviour. They attend lectures, but all seem to have missed ‘Doing the right thing, 101’. You’ve got a bunch of kids and one of them falls. And so the unravelling begins.
Read it overnight in bed, with the windows shut and the door locked. Watch out for the delightful ones. You never know what they’re plotting.
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