Book review: A study in panic is quite a relaxed read

'One Perfect Stranger' is guaranteed to keep your mind off work as you stretch out on the beach, settle into a long international train journey or relax into a warming spa bath

RB Egan’s novel is structured into sections to up the tension. Image courtesy of Darley Anderson Agency

• One Perfect Stranger 
• RB Egan
• Hodder and Stoughton, pb  €16.99 

It is great to have a page-turner packed in your hold luggage. 

Here is one that is guaranteed to keep your mind off work as you stretch out on the beach, settle into a long international train journey or relax into a warming spa bath.

Dubliner RB Egan’s One Perfect Stranger is a study in panic. His main, and only fully realised, character is Nicole, an ordinary woman just like you or me. 

She has two children, a husband, a sweet old-lady neighbour and all the material attributes necessary for a normal life.

Then, just before the opening of the novel, her husband loses his brother and takes a break from his lucrative and responsible job as a surgeon. Suddenly the couple cannot meet their regular suburban-life bills.

But those worries could, in most similar situations, be contained and managed. Not in Nicole’s life. 

She sees an unexpected message on her laptop — she is to receive €1m if she will agree to drive a car.

On accessing her bank account, through her app, Nicole is staggered to find that the money has already been deposited. 

She is instructed to tell no one or her family will be in danger. This is unfortunate as she has a sister, Alva, and brother-in-law who are senior police officers

In order to up the tension, Egan structures One Perfect Stranger in sections lasting a matter of hours, stretching over two weeks. 

At one moment it will be Very Early Morning on Wednesday 15th November and, after a few pages, it becomes Morning on Wednesday 15th November.

Nicole is up very early and very late. She is sleep deprived and constantly starving since she has no time, nor wish, to eat properly. 

After she falls on the stairs, owing to exhaustion and disorientation, Alva invites the children to her house for several nights.

Nicole’s husband, Mark, is absent: even when he’s supposed to be in the house he is sleeping, or out running, and Nicole’s hopes of speaking with him are dashed. 

This culminates in his disappearance from the family home so that Nicole is desperately searching for him, while finding, as she burrows into his affairs, further evidence of financial difficulties.

Adding to the sense of time whizzing by are the words that Egan uses for Nicole. She is breathless. She darts. She rushes. She hurries. 

The technology that she uses to try to solve her problems are fast too, smartphones, laptops, and sat navs. The cars that she drives are speedy.

Nicole wants to give no indication to “they”, whoever they are, that she is not following their explicit instructions. 

They trap her inside her house saying that she is not to leave. They seem to have external access to her devices. They are watching her.

For the reader none of this matters. The peripheral characters are unformed and so seem unimportant. Nicole herself has no confidante and is spiralling from one ghastly situation to the next. 

In her troubles, she has little agency, and much of her concern is to try to ensure that her life looks quotidian from the outside. She does not want to raise suspicion.

The outcome is that a book full of stress is quite relaxing to read. 

It is hard to engage with the two-dimensional characters and Nicole, at the centre of the maelstrom, is rendered powerless even as she struggles to combat her tormenters.

But it is a puzzle, and it is satisfying to see it solved.

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