'You were some dish', says Betsy Thornhill's boyfriend seeing an old photograph of her. A casual remark, but Betsy, a fifty-year-old American living in London, finds herself looking in the mirror. Conscious, for the first time in her life, of age. A food photographer, she sees the implicit rot not just in the fruit and cheese and lobsters she takes pictures of, but in her own flesh. She goes in for a 'little work' on her face and comes out looking marvellous. Younger by fifteen years. Younger than she could have imagined. License to start again. She goes back to New York where she has not lived for thirty years, to a city traumatized by the aftermath of September 11, its own flesh ripped up. A few days after she arrives, Betsy is accused of murder. She looks at the police sketch. 'It isn't me', she says. '
It's someone younger'. 'Look in the mirror', says the cop. Betsy is trapped by her own face.
This begins a Hitchockian tale of mistaken identity, a gripping tale of food, death and sex, of youth and age. If I'm thirty-five, Betsy wonders, who am I? What are the markers in my life? As she searches for the real killer in a city drowning in the worst snowstorm in years, she stumbles through her own past which leads her to a terrifying, heartbreaking conclusion.
Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. She is a journalist and documentary film-maker. She is the author of the critically acclaimed series featuring Artie Cohen, Moscow-born New Yorker and the first great post-Cold War cop. The series began with 'Red Mercury Blues' and continued with 'Hot Poppies', 'Bloody London' and, most recently, 'Sex Dolls'.
Michael Frayn
Spies
Reggie Nadelson
