Catch Me When I Fall

Nicci French

I'll start by saying, right up front, that Catch Me When I Fall is not Nicci French's best novel. It's a good one, but if you're new to the world of Nicci French, I strongly recommend starting with a stronger work-- Killing Me Softly, for example, or my favorite, Beneath the Skin. That said, if you're already a fan, you will likely find this enjoyable.

Holly Krauss is the wild-child head of one of those firms that takes executives on team-building weekends. One night, she has entirely too much to drink and ends up having a one-night stand. While this is bad enough, she manages in her drunken state to leave a few things at his apartment, of the kind that will allow him to effectively stalk her.

This sort of setup would normally be enough for a Nicci French novel (or two or three), but the husband-and-wife writing team don't stop there, and in not stopping there make this much different from the Nicci French novels you're used to. While there's a bit of suspense to be had, it's in the background (even when it's the main thrust of the story); it becomes obvious relatively early on that not all is right in Holly's world, and we turn from suspense novel into odd combination of tell-all memoir and chick-lit mental-dysfunction novel. While it's still readable, as everything in the land of French is, it's new ground, and it's rife with pitfalls odd little details surface, then disappear, never to be heard from again. There's foreshadowing that goes nowhere, and worse, when they try to get back into suspense mode, they falter; about halfway through the novel, you will encounter one of the most botched, obvious cases of attempted misdirection you will ever see.

I realize that I'm being unreasonably harsh here, and I'm not entirely sure why; after all, I did find it, at the least, an interesting experiment; once it got off the ground (and it was a bit slower than usual in doing so), it was as readable as any other French novel, and I devoured the last two hundred pages or so in the space of a day. Yet in the end it had that empty-calorie feel to it; unlike French's earlier works, this one left not so much as an aftertaste. But still, it's a good way to kill time.