Used Women's Book Club

Finished reading The Used Women's Book Club by Paul Bryers few days ago.  An easy read.

The story : On the night the Used Women's Book Club meets to swap novels and exchange literary views, Rob the husband (a womanizer) of one of its members is being brutally murdered in the flat of his childhood friend Larry, who by any chance, is contemplating an affair with Meg, Rob's wife.

I wasn't surprised to find out later that Rob is also screwing one of the book club member.  To spice it up literarily, Virginia Woolf, along with Jack the Ripper, are introduced and interwoven in this tense thriller.  Interesting.

Some passages that I'd like to note down :

The demon voice in his ear - or his head. Larry heard it as clearly now as when the speaker was alive, with its rasping note of sarcasm - or irony - or wonder that anyone could be quite so naive. Death had not blunted its edge. There was no sign yet that Rob would sink gracefully into the silence beyond the grave.  Perhaps because he wasn't in a grave. He was in some frozen drawer of a police morgue with a tag on his toe. [pg55]

In the version Jo's father read to her - the hollywood version, just as the wolf is about to gobble up the little girl, the woodsman rushes into the cottage and kills it with his axe.  Then he cuts open the wolf's stomach and out jumps the little girl's grandmother, alive and kicking.  Then Little Riding Hood marries the woodsman and they all live happily ever after.

But in the version Jo's mother told her -  the bohemian version - the wolf eats both the grandmother and the little girl and that is the end of them.  No woodsman with his axe, no marriage, just a blood-soaked hood and well-fed wolf. [pg69 - which was meant as a warning, so that pretty little girls didn't stop to speak to strange man]

Rob's theory, of course, was that women were attracted to the wildness in men but had a compulsion to tame it out of them.  They didn't want to share their cave with the human equivalent of a cave bear but they'd rather have him on the inside pissing out, than on the outside pissing in. So he had to be house-trained, the same as all the other animals: the dogs and horses, the beasts of burden.  They had to be broken in.  Unbroken, they were dangerous. [pg209]

Jo was in two minds about being picked up from the airport.  On the one hand, it was nice to be met. On the other, she would have preferred not to be met at seven in the morning at the age of thirty-seven after a night flight across the Atlantic by someone with whom she was contemplating a romance. [pg218]