Mr Rochester, I presume

Kit Quinn is an attractive young woman who works as a psychologist in London, treating middle-class neuroses at the Welbeck Clinic and the criminally insane at Market Hill Hospital. One afternoon a colleague with better things to do passes on a simple assignment: she's to call at Stretton Green police station to assess Michael Doll, a subnormal young man who has been hanging around a local primary school, much to the parents' anxiety. But it turns out not to be so simple: driven into a frenzy of terror by Kit's questioning and Detective Inspector Furth's aggression, Doll lashes out with a coffee mug, scarring Kit's face and her psyche.

A few months later, when the body of Lianne, a 17-year-old homeless girl, is discovered on the bank of the canal where Doll likes to fish, it's obvious to the police - and especially DI Furth - that Doll is responsible: Kit is called in again to help fit him up for the crime. But, as a girl with high moral principles, she refuses to do so, destroys their case, and solves the crime - and several others - herself, relying not on her skills as a psychologist, but on her ability to find evidence the police have missed, to re-interpret that which they have found, and to suggest new lines of investigation when they are baffled.

She has, too, a personal life: an old friend, the vibrantly beautiful Julie, back from hitching round the world, moves into her flat and makes her feel grossly inferior: incapable of whipping up a meal in seconds, and with a wholly inadequate bosom. The police, getting everything wrong as usual, think they are a gay couple, not knowing that in the course of her inquiries Kit has fallen madly in love with an older man: dark, saturnine, brooding and mysterious Will Pavic, who runs a hostel for the homeless.

This is an absorbing, highly addictive read. Though the intrigue is implausibility piled on implausibility, the galloping pace of the narrative and the interest of Kit's character keep disbelief at bay; and the author has cunningly, though perhaps unwittingly, enlisted the aid of a powerful literary archetype: Pavic is another Mr Rochester, and The Red Room a modern version of Jane Eyre.