Review: Vivien Horler
A Short Life – a novel, by Nicky Greenwall (Penguin Random House)
I like thrillers set in Cape Town, as long as the author doesn’t take too many chances – like the book I read a year or two ago in which a character caught a train from Bakoven. Eish.
This one sticks pretty close to the geography as we know it, and as one reviewer put it, it’s “a twisty, thrilling ride, much like those Cape Town roads where it is set…”
And there is certainly a lot of driving on twisty roads – between town and Llandudno, between Llandudno and Constantia Nek, and between Green Point to Constantia Nek via Constantia.
Six friends – in their 20s, 30s and 40s – get together to celebrate Nick and Franky’s wedding anniversary. They eat at a restaurant in Bree Street, and then some of them go on to a club to dance.
Maria declines, as she has to get back to the babysitter, she says, but her husband Adam is enthusiastic. The other couple, Charley and Sebastian, go to the club briefly but then leave – they make movie ads and they have a shoot in the morning.
Eventually Adam, Nick’s close friend, leaves, heading home to Hout Bay. The others are concerned he has had too much to drink, but he says he’ll take an Uber. Nick and Franky stay on, dancing, until Nick realises he has had five missed calls from Adam.
He phones him back to hear Adam has flipped his car into a ditch on the road up to Constantia Nek. He clearly didn’t take an Uber.
Charley and Nick drive to the spot and find Adam, unhurt but paralytically drunk, beside his car. Nick whisks him away – they can report the accident to police in the morning, when they’re all sober.
Meanwhile Charley and Sebastian have gone home to Llandudno and are in bed, asleep.
The next morning Franky, who is a close friend of Charley’s, is awoken by a call from a distraught Sebastian. “Charley’s gone,” he tells her.
Charley is dead. It emerges that at some time in the night she got out of bed and drove away from Llandudno, crashing on the Hout Bay road.
Police and later a private investigator say she appears to have swerved to miss something, and crashed into a tree. Later the PI finds footprints leading away from the crashed car – Charley had someone with her.
Sebastian is beside himself. Why did she get up and go out? Who was with her in the car? Could she have been hijacked? Did she have a lover?
Adam too is terrified. He can remember absolutely nothing about his accident – could he have been wandering all over the road and caused Charley to swerve? Could he be responsible for her death?
Meanwhile Franky and Nick are frightened they could be in trouble for taking an inebriated Adam away from an accident scene.
The only person who doesn’t seem worried is Maria, who left early to relieve the babysitter. But it turns out she too has her secrets.
This is a thoroughly readable novel, although I took a while at the start to sort out who was who. The action moves from the events of the Friday night anniversary dinner to the days and months afterwards, as well as flashing back to the six friends’ earlier lives.
If there’s a moral, it’s don’t drink and then tackle mountain roads. Take an Uber. And once you’re safe in bed, stay there.