cover image Chicken Feed

Chicken Feed

Alma Fritchley. Women's Press (UK), $13.95 (223pp) ISBN 978-0-7043-4570-6

Letty Campbell is ready to settle in for three long months of loneliness while her lover, Anne, is away on a lecture tour in America. Before Letty can even get around to feeding the chickens on her West Yorkshire farm, however, Anne's mysterious younger half-sister, Laura, shows up unexpectedly. Though Laura soon departs, she leaves Letty in charge of her young daughter. The ensuing tangle of former lovers, friends and enemies makes this tale difficult to follow. Letty herself can hardly make sense of the ties binding one character to the next. The hint of a crime doesn't appear until midway through the book, when a controversial lesbian Member of Parliament--the current lover of Letty's ex-flame--disappears. Curiously, Letty does not investigate the peculiar coincidences and odd behaviors that surround her, leaving readers to piece together the vague clues themselves. In the end, a battered Letty literally stumbles onto the mystery's solution. Fritchley's characters are fun and engaging, but their complicated doings are related in a plot line as squiggly as, well, the path of a chicken pecking at its feed. (Jan.)