I love a good "devil child" novel - as regular readers of this blog will know, I also like the occasional bad "devil child" novel (see my review of Margaret Bingley's The Unquiet dead for proof).
What I don't like is tedious medical soap operas that very very clumsily change genre in the last three chapters.
That unfortunately means that, despite the rather eye-catching cover, this one is a definite miss.
The storyline is supposed to be about children who suddenly turn evil and kill those around them. What we get is the politics and love lives of the staff of the doctor tasked with solving the problem.
An ex member of staff is sleeping with his receptionist whilst planning a hostile takeover of the clinic run by our noble doctor, who also has to deal with troubles at home and the fallout of a legal case that is referenced many many times. The receptionist is feeling guilty about cheating on her military vet husband who has serious PTSD. All this is going on instead of the story about children going mad and killing people.
Also in place of juicy shreddies, we get seemingly endless pages of medical detail on how to separate out viral particles, medical jargon and gobbledygook that all turns out to be pointless when the source of the plague of suddenly violent children is revealed.
There really isn't much to recommend this. It's been in my TBR for probably 20 years and it really should have stayed there. That Les Edwards cover really is the best thing about it.
One of my biggest questions - the lead character is called Neils - is that pronounced Kneels or does it rhyme with Miles? I was switching pronunciation all the way through.
A lot of the time, these mass market paperbacks from the 80s are worth silly amounts of money. This isn't one of those. If you see a copy going cheap online - ignore it. It's not worth your time.
File under "I read this so you don't have to".
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