Nina Fraser and Simon Jordan are childhood sweethearts and live in a small town in Vermont. They seem to be perfectly suited and their respective families expect them to get married. But after a weekend away together in a cabin, Simon returns home alone alleging they had a row and broke up, that Nina told him she was interested in someone else. He says she arranged for a friend to collect her, but clearly this never happened. She’s disappeared.
 
Nina’s parents are convinced Simon knows where she is and what really happened, while his parents pull out all the stops to protect their son. Being far wealthier and more influential than the Frasers, the Jordans have the advantage. Detective Matthew Wright also has his suspicions about Simon, but proving them correct is another matter.
 
Is Simon guilty? Nina’s disappearance hits the headlines with the resulting plethora of social media armchair detectives, conspiracy theorists and vicious anonymous opinions. The Jordans even get their lawyers and PR agents to use this to their advantage to make it look as if not is all as it should be in the Fraser family, causing them additional distress.
 
I’ve now read most of this author’s thrillers as she has proved to be top-rate in her genre, but this stand-alone novel (several of her others are about an Irish detective) has to be her best so far. Her portrayal of the two mothers, one who has lost her child and is determined to know the truth, the other defending hers no matter the cost, is particularly skilful, and her hard-hitting dialogue as it relates to that curse of our modern world, “trial by media”, is exceptional.
 
If you’ve never read Dervla McTiernan, then this novel is a great place to start.
 
Four-and-a-half stars.
 
 
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My father had known a man - whose name unfortunately I don’t recall - who’d worked and sailed with Errol Flynn in Australia and New Guinea in the years before he was famous and he’d told my father some of the shocking and hair-raising experiences with Flynn that wouldn’t have been common knowledge at the time, including Flynn's relationships with native women and involvement in rough justice meted out to plantation workers.

As an impressionable teenager rather obsessed with movie stars, this prompted me to surreptitiously read “My Wicked, Wicked Ways”, the shocking memoir of Flynn, although it now appears that early edition had been edited or expurgated in order to avoid possible law suits and more recent editions have been restored to include Flynn’s real opinion of the dark underbelly of the Hollywood he knew, plus his own guilt at having embraced what it stood for.
 
This new biography reveals much more. The author has been able to draw on private letters of Flynn and his family members and other rare hitherto unpublished archival material.
 
At the present time when the Epstein scandal shows no sign of going away, the searing similarities to what was going on in Hollywood from the 1920s onwards can’t be avoided. Starry-eyed girls and young women were trafficked with the promises of glamorous careers in the movies in exchange for sexual favours. Nearly all of the studio bosses and many others in powerful positions were culpable, and of course leading virile actors like Flynn took full advantage of the system. Flynn became notorious for his penchant for under-age girls and even faced a trial for rape, acquitted by a jury top-heavy with middle-aged women who were probably fans. When he died aged only 50, his partner was still a teenager. He’d also been married three times, always disastrously.
 
Flynn’s family was dysfunctional going back several generations and is covered here in detail. His academic father was a womaniser and his mother also had a relationship while still married. She was reputedly descended from Edward Young, one of the infamous “Bounty” mutineers – an interesting fact considering Flynn’s first film role was that of Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutineers. There was nothing glamorous about those mutineers, they kidnapped and exploited both Tahitian women and men, and what took place on Pitcairn Island, then and since, doesn’t augur well for a long genetic line of moralists. (See photo below taken by me of Flynn’s ring at the Bounty Museum, Norfolk Island.)
 
An immensely readable biography, although in some places there is extensive exposition on world events or history as background to Flynn’s antics that may not require reinforcement for some readers and easily can be skipped through.
 
This paragraph sums up Flynn’s life and legacy:
 
“Errol Flynn’s incredible life elicits competing emotions that run the full gamut from ardent admiration and curiosity to disgust. This journey through his life … reveals something greater than the life of one man … [his] story gives insight into the turbulent worlds he inhabited, and the great points of friction that made him both celebrated and contested, then and now. The questions about men’s power and sexual privileges, the entitlements and enablement of celebrities and the rich and powerful, the searing politics and enduring impacts of race and morality campaigns, the way men and women relate to each other, and the immense gulfs between what society permits for one sex and not the other, continue to convulse our lives.”
 
Four-and-a-half stars
 
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