Girl Friends by Alex Dahl
I’ve read a few rather underwhelming page turners recently but, rest assured, this is going to be a positive review. Dahl is an experienced psychological thriller writer and she skilfully depicts a rather smug and privileged group of ex-pat Norwegian female friends living in lovely houses in Wimbledon. Straightaway, therefore, one gets the great pleasure of seeing the well-ordered lives of the very wealthy, global but not super rich CEO class beginning to unravel. That’s because, of course, their lives aren’t as smooth as they seem and they have hang ups and issues from their past that emerge, gradually. Yes, it’s a familiar set up and none the worst for that.
We have two main narrative voices that lead us through this story. Charlotte an attractive, over-organised forty something who has reinvented herself as the Keto Queen, providing advice in books and television about the benefits of a carb free, protein based diet as well as exuding a sorted lifestyle. Except she isn’t sorted but rather bored. When, therefore, she meets her husband’s new boss’ wife, the free spirited Bianka, she is immediately attracted and a little wary.
Bianka eschews the simple, chic style of Charlotte’s girlfriends by wearing bold, colourful outfits; she also embodies a joie de vivre missing from the Keto Queen’s life. When Bianka takes on the narrative duties, though, we realise that her life is also more complicated than the surface sheen might indicate. She has a difficult relationship with her stepson, Storm, a teenage, international skiing star; and there are hints that the uneasiness between Bianka and her husband, Emil, is rooted in his previous marriage and the silence around what happened to his first wife.
Things begin to heat up, literally and metaphorically, when Charlotte invites Bianka to her second home on Ibiza much against the wishes of her old friends with whom she normally holidays there. And their concerns are quickly confirmed as Charlotte moves from her usual chilled, yoga and beach lounging persona to a buzzed, Ibiza party girl – encouraged, of course, by Bianka, her new BFF.
There are many pleasures in this book. Besides the schadenfreude already mentioned at the crumbling of these gilded women’s lives, there’s an ambiguity about who is playing whom that emerges from the two women’s narratives. Both in their own way are unreliable narrators and both move, at different times, between a flinty resilience and needy fragility.
Another, perhaps surprising pleasure for a book that seems to be, ostensibly, a psychological thriller is that there is plenty of plot. By that, I mean, there is tense action, a plethora of crimes and twisty, surprising plot developments. Dahl handles all these strands with aplomb, including Storm’s narrative as he seeks answers to the mysteries from his childhood.
This is a definite page turner and an ideal summer beach read.