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Blind Date is one of the Frances Fyfield standalones, separate from the Helen West series, and it is the book I press into the hands of readers of the British psychological-thriller tradition. Elisabeth Kennedy is a former police officer whose sister was murdered by an unidentified killer and who has been living in the Norfolk fens, mostly alone, since the trauma. The killer, as she eventually understands, is closer than she had realized.
Fyfield writes the trauma with the kind of insider attention that the form rarely affords. Elisabeth is allowed to be both a competent former police officer and a person whose competence has been broken by what happened to her sister, and Fyfield refuses to make the recovery clean or easy. The fen geography is one of the book's pleasures.
The closing chapters land with the kind of weight that you feel in the chest. Five stars. A genuinely important British psychological thriller. Recommended without reservation.
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