It has to be 'it'!

INFIDELITY
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
Pan Books
417 pages
Rs235

Appearances can indeed be deceiving. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, It girl, known for her fun-loving, hard-drinking, cocaine-sniffing, party-going and throwing socialite image, made even less appealing by the collapse of her nasal cartilage after too much drug ingestion via that route, has cleaned up her act…and her nose, too. And pretty successfully too! As television presenter, reality show contestant and host, as well as pianist and magazine and newspaper columnist, she turned writer with all the elan that she showed in everything else she did. Her first book, the non-fiction The Naughty Girl’s Guide to Life, published in 2007, led to her first novel, Inheritance, which was sort-of-autobiographical, telling the story of Lyric Charlton, the good girl who took a turn into the wild side of life and finally came out the other end, not unscathed, but better than before.

Infidelity takes off where Inheritance stopped. Lyric has found real love in the man who worships her, Philippe, a gardener who has made it big in the world of green. And she has another very important man in her life, her twin brother Edward, who was kidnapped by their uncle Quentin, who has since become a Tibetan monk in the mountains in India. The tangled tale wanders briskly along, with race meets, horses, cocktails and extravagant parties and gentle emotion, with not much significant happening. Until the murder. Which comes as a shock to all connected. It starts long before it actually happens and with all the various characters going in and out, no one can be sure who did it, once it is established that there was in fact a suspicious death. But gradually, delicately, it all comes unwound and the end comes logically, painlessly, elegantly.

This one may not be steamy-sexy or wildly sensationalistic, but it is well written, fairly absorbing and very easy to digest, with no gory details, explicit lovemaking or anything even remotely unpleasant. A good read for a not-too-long flight, a stint in the salon or a dull Sunday afternoon waiting for the painters to finish in the kitchen.