Jodi Picoult: Salem falls

By PENELOPE BEIDER

This fat page-turner may start its journey "on the second worst day of Addie Peabody's life" but it is also the day Jack St Bride stumbles into her world.

Addie is the owner of the Do-Or-Diner in Salem Falls, New Hampshire, and through sheer willpower she works her long days, producing delicious food and keeping everyone happy while she deals with, or rather doesn't deal with, a tragic past.

On a freezing spring evening Jack St Bride is dropped off near the diner, and he decides this small town is a place where he can disappear for a while.

How wrong he is.

A shell of his former self, Dr St Bride was formerly a teacher at a posh private girls' school, also in New Hampshire in the town of Loyal (whose name is to assume a larger significance). Dashing, tall, handsome, at 31 he, too, is carrying heaps of baggage from his past.

So, this is the story of two fragile people, victims, nursing wrongs done to them, trying to find their way back into the world of the living.

Just the book to take on that winter holiday, Salem Falls is an undemanding but nevertheless reasonably gripping and satisfying read.

If you know 35-year-old Picoult's previous bestselling novels (there are eight, including Keeping Faith, The Pact and Plain Truth), you'll know what I mean.

And once you've got past a touch of American schmalz, it's surprisingly hard to put down. Picoult plants just enough seeds of doubt in our hero's capabilities that you do need to find out what happens.

Not only has poor Jack St Bride had his career ruined by a student's crush that led to false accusations and a prison term, but in Salem Falls he has the misfortune to run up against a quartet of teenage girls who are practising sorcery and witchcraft.

Echoing back to the infamous events of 1692 in Salem that Arthur Miller used in his play The Crucible, the last third of this book is a courtroom drama, where Picoult's meticulous legal and medical research shows but does not overwhelm a good story.

Community hysteria is a rich field for fiction but Picoult's skill is that she does not overdo it, making the various characters credible, funny and likeable.

Allen & Unwin

$29.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer