David Hunt

This novel opens by describing the heroine, Kay Farrow. She wears a T-shirt, jeans, leather jacket and a Contax camera, and lives in San Francisco. It conveys that she's tough, streetwise and creative. She trawls through the druggie and prostitute community, and befriends and takes photographs of bisexual/homosexual Tim Lovsey. He is killed and butchered, and there begins the start of a murder-mystery story.

Farrow's father is a retired police officer who now bakes bread; she has a seventy year old photography mentor, a hippy journalist friend who calls her 'kiddo', and, after she is beaten up, a doctor lover called Sasha. She practices aikido - although Hunt does not know much about martial arts. He says that Farrow practices katas (pre-arranged patterns) which aikido does not have, and describes someone practising Tai Chi katas - there is only one Tai Chi form for each respective version, and it is not correct to describe it as 'kata', which is the Japanese term applied to karate forms.

The seedy underworld is glamorised, as when Farrow regards her photographic project as "street hustler as psychic explorer…in my pictures I want to capture the lives of those who, by offering their bodies to danger and to lust, risk all, and by so doing achieve a kind of stature".

Running through the narrative is a depiction of the aesthetic and psychology of the photographic gaze. Farrow has a telescope in her room which she peers through regularly and she says "by interposing a lens I stylise reality and by so doing shield myself from pain". She is often sexually aroused when her work goes well: "I love photography, the sense of capture, the sureness that possesses me when I'm getting at something deep". The camera is her means of negotiating life and discovering meaning; it empowers her and she admires her mentor as "mistress of the direct, unblinking gaze; the gaze that, in her words, probes, strips, reveals".

The prose is basic and does not impress you with its fluency, creativity or style; the characters are a little formulaic and unconvincing. Farrow's aikido study is introduced far too abruptly, like she is visiting a shop to buy a newspaper. Yet the story is entertaining, and you want to finish the book to resolve several unanswered questions.