Martina Cole: Faceless

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Martina Cole's got the market in tacky sewn up with her series of bad girl, bad cover shots. This latest, with the hard-faced blonde staring out at you, a prison wall topped with razor wire behind her, gives fair warning of what's between the covers.

Marie Carter has just been released from prison after 12 years. "She had been 21, pretty in a makeup and tits kind of way, when she had beaten to death two other prostitutes in a squat in Kensington." She can't remember having done it - a consequence, she assumes, of having been off her face on drugs at the time.

Her cow of a mother refuses to see her, her cow of a sister hates her. Her father, cowed into submission by the manipulative women in his life, is forbidden to make contact with the daughter he secretly loves best.

Marie's two kids don't want to see her either. Her daughter, Tiffany, despite having followed her mother into the same life - she's a drug addict who has had a child to Marie's former partner and pimp - won't forgive her. And Marie is not going to easily forgive said pimp for the misery he's brought upon her family.

Plenty of scope for melodrama in that lot. And for much of the book, that's what you get, all delivered in an irritating rendition of East End patois which doesn't quite come off. There is a twist in its ending, but by the time you make it there, the characters have proved so irredeemably awful that you just want somebody to leap onto the pages and knock the whole lot of them off.

Hodder Moa Beckett

$34.95