Felicity Price: No Angel

By ANNE GIBSON

The second novel in two years from Christchurch author and businesswoman Felicity Price follows much the same formula as her first book, Dancing in the Wilderness, blending romance with murder and intrigue.

Those who liked the first book will enjoy the second, which uses the same dual-plot technique between the chapters and flashes between past and present.

Dancing in the Wilderness was set in the coalmining area of Dennison on the West Coast of the South Island and was the saga of two women - young immigrant miner's wife Etta Jackson and her granddaughter, Stephanie Hunter, a public relations consultant who left London to work for a multinational logging company fighting environmental activists on the West Coast.

No Angel is set on the West Coast and in Nelson.

It is also the saga of two women - saloon worker Carrie O'Neill and public relations consultant Alex Zerakowski, who leaves the United States to work for a Nelson winery that has sold land to a landfill developer and also battles protesters.

Part of the latest book is based on fact. Carrie O'Neill's lover, Richard Burgess, was the ringleader in the gang involved in the Maungatapu murders of 1866 where five men carrying gold and cash were killed on the main track between Canvastown and Nelson.

He wrote his autobiography, The Confessions of Richard Burgess, while awaiting trial and was executed at Nelson Gaol in October 1866.

Fiction is blended with the fact.

When Alex moves to a vineyard cottage at Hope, near Nelson, she finds Carrie's letters and diary and realises the parallels between their situations and that both have fallen for men who are bad for them.

Price is a gifted writer who uses real events of the past to bring the present into sharper focus in her second book.

If she produces another book in time for Christmas next year, fans will be third time lucky.

Hazard Press

$24.95