![]() ![]() Rindell ensures that both girls share top billing. Suddenly she is plunged into the gaudy glare of illicit dance halls and speakeasies, hobnobbing with Brooklyn bootleggers and Newport socialites and intoxicated by bright lights, moonshine, bathtub gin - and her new friend, Odalie. In saunters glamorous, mesmerizing Odalie, and as Rose falls under her spell her world is transformed. ![]() Then one day there is a new addition to the typing pool. She is plain, her life dull, despite the grisly confessions she types up on a daily basis. Rose is an orphaned young woman working as a typist at a police precinct. New York City, 1924, and Prohibition is in full swing. ![]() And the more we read, the closer we are drawn to the edge of our seat, such is the pull of this fiendishly crafty psychological thriller. From this moment on Rindell forces us to view her heroine as an unreliable narrator, to sift and evaluate the details of her account, no matter in what order they are presented. ![]() Until this point we trusted her every word now it transpires that she is ill, her mind sick. Then comes her bombshell: The doctor she is seeing has said it is vital she tell her story chronologically - “He says that telling things in their accurate sequence is good for healing the mind.” Rose throws us with this revelation. About 80 pages into “The Other Typist” (Putnam/Amy Einhorn Books, 356 pages, $25.95), Suzanne Rindell’s superb debut novel, the first-person narrator, Rose Baker, interrupts her tale to inform us that she is getting the events out of order. ![]()
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