Lead Review

• Book: Halfway House
• Location: Edinburgh
• Author: Helen Fitzgerald

Review Author: tripfiction

3.5*

The publicity blurb describes Halfway House as a thriller. It isn’t… The characters are just too outrageous and unbelievable to make it so. Plus there are no real or unexpected thrills. It is, though, a good and darkly humorous read. Lou, twenty one years old, travels to Edinburgh from Melbourne following the end of an affair with a married man. She is in desperate need of work and an income, and the only job she can find is as ‘night manager’ at a hallway house for high risk offenders being assimilated back into the community. The inmates (or ‘residents’ as the system likes to call them) are a scary bunch. Amongst others Lou has two killers, a celebrity paedophile, and a paranoid coke dealer to cope with. One of the killers is also a seriously addicted gambler who builds up large debts. What could possibly go wrong? The answer is almost everything… Lou has an unseemly affair with the killer/gambler – who she believes is innocent of killing his parents until she discovers he is not. One of the sex offenders is upskirting passing women on a night out and masturbating as he watches them through a basement window. The coke dealer starts using his stock (in large quantities and with disastrous outcomes) rather than selling it…

BUY NOW

Although the story is very darkly funny, it is also pretty disturbing. And, as I said, it is not a thriller. Even in this day and age, I find it hard to believe that such a disparate bunch of unreformed criminals who had served their time would be allowed to come and go freely from accommodation such as the halfway house. Yes, everyone should be offered a second chance, but not at the expense of the wider community. Any reforming educational programmes they had experienced the inside had clearly not worked.

Halfway House is an entertaining read that I bowled though quite nicely. But i doubt it is one I shall come back to very often in my thoughts.

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