Primrose Hill : a novel /

A low-level druggie, Si, narrates his version of a murder plot hatched on a hill that rises above the squalor of London's inner city and is frequented by retro-hippie dopers and pushers. Si is Hamlet once-removed: his semibuddy Danny wants to kill his mother's boyfriend, who supplies her with drugs and beats her. While Danny sees the case for murder as clear cut--it's a form of trash removal, he argues--Si agonizes, both over the terror of abuse he's witnessed firsthand at Danny's house and over the casualness with which his friends consider murder another kind of high. Si's take on the horrific home lives endured by his friends and himself is both caustic and heart-wrenching, and his observations (like his repugnance over his pregnant mother) are often screamingly funny. Falconer's powerful novel is a kind of doped-up, jittery version of Strangers on a Train. Powerful. --Connie Fletcher

Originally published in England, this colorful, often harrowing debut pits teenage Si and his best friend, Danny, against Danny's mother Josie's abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend, turning what the boys have termed a 1990s-style summer of love into a summer of violence and revenge. Suddenly, their school break isn't just about hanging out on London's Primrose Hill. The boys hatch a desperate plan to kill the man who has beaten Josie with a baseball bat, stabbed her with scissors and kept her addicted to and begging for drugs. The one diversion from these grim preoccupations is Eleanor, a 15-year-old whom Si meets on the hill. Both a rich, flirtatious delinquent who eagerly joins in the murder plot and a troubled child with a dark secret, Eleanor is a stubborn, perplexing character who steals every scene she's in and occupies a good deal of space in Si's head besides. The dialogue doesn't sound a single wrong note, but the characters act on a limited stage: Si's mother, Louise, is pregnant with a baby whose benign but lazy father, Andy, has "done a runner," much like Si's own father, who decided he was gay and deserted the family shortly after his only son was born. The most moving aspect of the story is Si's presence at the birth of his baby sister and his quasi-fatherly devotion to her and his mother; less effective is Danny's single-minded protectiveness of his own mother. Though the novel purports to be about the "thin lines... between doing the right things and doing the wrong thing... between life and death," it doesn't quite measure up to those lofty aimsÄbut its verve infuses the bleak events with intelligence and heart. (Mar. 30) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A hot London summer brings three teenagers into a folie à trois of murder and deception. When school lets out, childhood friends Si and Danny seem to be just a pair of normal kids, their heads filled with action movies, ad copy, inspirational bestsellers, and smoke. They’ve been so close for so long that, as Si guilelessly says, “If it hadn’t been for AIDS, we would’ve been blood brothers.” But that’s before they meet the bewitching, bewildering Eleanor, a forthright 15-year-old who wastes no time asking whether Si wants to have sex with her and whether he’s interested in taking a Mediterranean cruise with her and her charming but vaguely sinister uncle Richard. And it’s before Si’s mother’s pregnancy brings Andy, her feckless vanished lover, back to her side to administer an unofficial but timely dose of pethidine to ease her labor, and before Danny’s mother’s pregnancy earns her another beating from the drug supplier (and father-to-be) the boys call Shortarse. Fearing that her abusive lover’s next assault will leave his drug-dependent mother dead, Danny announces his intention of killing him, and he’s encouraged in his plan to destroy the bogeyman who might well turn into as big a monster as “that Hitler guy” by the intrepid Eleanor, who after a long, spine-tingling seduction of both boys to very different ends, accompanies them to Shortarse’s lair. Danny’s murderous plot, like so much else in this firecracker debut, doesn’t exactly come off as expected, however, leaving Si to come to painful terms with his role in the problems it unleashes—and in the still more agonizing problems his friendship with Eleanor, in an uncannily intricate parallel, is about to unleash as well. Falconer moves with an electrifying sense of the inexorable, from lightweight satire to the steadily deepening terror that life-or-death decisions cast over kids of every age.