Childhood crimes

JENNIFER POTTER

Nicci French THE MEMORY GAME 323pp Heinemann £12 0434003093

his first novel cunningly exploits the current rent fad of Recovered Memory Syndrome to turn the whodunit on its head Here the witness acts the sleuth reducing the police and the judiciary to limp rubber-stamps But how reliable a tool is memory And how trustworthy is the craggy-jawed therapist Dr Alex Dermot-Brown who blu-tacks children's drawings to the walls of his messy Camden Town kitchen and wears trainers jeans and ragged woolly jumpers Nicci French's can of worms is unsealed by the discovery of a girl's body twenty-five years after her disappearance Just sixteen when she vanished Natalie was the daughter of boozing womanizing literary lion Alan Martello and the saintly children s-book illustrator Martha Workmen disturb her bones beneath the barbecue of the family's Shropshire home where Alan and Martha's architect daughter-in-law Jane Martello has begun work on an overflow house for the ex- (wives children dren etc of the mushrooming Martellos Jane will soon be an ex herself Having grown up as Nooftalie's surrogate sister...