After 19 years of a loveless marriage, Angela Cruickshank's patience is
exhausted at long last as she returns from France. Inevitably she goes
to stay with her old friends Clem and Kattie--Kattie who catches people
as other people catch colds, collector of strays and lame ducks, and who
somehow fits into her big rambling house on the Downs.
Kattie has other guests, of course--Hugh Hansard, a talented but
disorganized composer whose wife has just left him, as well as Fergus
Slack, not long out of a short stretch in Dartmoor, ex-dope dealer and
practised layabout looking for his next move. To add to the mixture is
Kattie's beautiful yet mythomaniac daughter Dorelia, home from her Swiss
boarding school. The comic accidents of Kattie's random household give
rise to more sinister events as Angela's husband comes to claim her
while Fergus, pursued by the local police, takes off with Dorelia as his
hostage. The action is fast and funny, and Annie Bullen has a sharp ear
for the accents of English country life in the 1980s.
Annie Bullen was born in Hampshire and still lives there with her two
children. She works as a journalist and Air and Angels is her first
novel.
