Flashback is an extraordinary book - it's difficult to praise it highly enough - six stars maybe?. Jenny Siler never writes formulaic mysteries anyway - since "Easy Money" when she sprang fully mature to the top of the genre, each of her novels has been more tense & atmospheric than the last. Flashback is an investigation by Eve into her own identity. Being left in France for dead, amnesiac, with a gunshot wound to the head, she recuperates with a community of nuns. From her teeth they tell her she's American; from a small scar, they say she had a child - but apart from the only clue to her previous life - a receipt for a ticket on the Tangier-Algeciras ferry - nobody knows who she is or why anybody wanted her dead. When the nuns are massacred - they had come for "the American" they said, Eve flees, taking with her the ferry receipt realising that wherever she is, she will be a danger to others. It involves travel from Marrakesh to Bratislava to discover who wants her dead, but along the way she finds out what kind of woman she is & what she is capable of doing. That she can fight if she must, that she can shoot - but what is she doing in Europe - & North Africa? The writing is beautiful - the plotting emaculate & the atmosphere - created by a background of shifting restless characters & the weather, with vivid descriptions of scents & smells, it creates a tension that grips to the end. I was captivated by the happy ending - I turned the book round & read it again.
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