If a woman went missing with £16 000 of their redundancy money, most men would think they’d been had, but not the trusting Mr Clark. Instead, he calls in Saz Martin. Struggling to run her PI business on an Enterprise Allowance scheme, Saz is grateful for the business. The problem is that although he regards the mystery woman as his ‘best friend’, Mr Clark knew her only as ‘September’; they met twice a month for dinner, but he knows nothing about her personal life – not even her reason for wanting the money.
Calendar Girl zings with upbeat energy, but there are dark undertones right from the outset. While the lesbian sex scenes are described in forthright detail, the violence is underplayed, and yet the constant threat is undeniable and unsettling.
Stand-up comedian Maggie, is besotted with ‘the girl with the Kelly McGillis body’, and the switch from Saz’s viewpoint to Maggie’s in alternate chapters varies the pace to good effect, with Maggie’s interludes creating a flesh-creeping sense of foreboding. Duffy’s stylistic quirk of using paragraph breaks to emphasise a point generally works very well, although occasionally I found the dramatic pauses jarred. This is a minor point, however: Saz Martin is a wonderful creation – humorous, intelligent, and engagingly ebullient.
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Margaret Murphy