With a name like The Feng-Shui Junkie, Brian Gallagher's first novel was always going to catch the eye, and with a five-figure advance involved, there is definitely a sense of anticipation about this book. In many ways, it's an unusual debut, not least because both the narrator and the author have practised as barristers at the Four Courts, both are married, and both are Irish, yet Gallagher has chosen to tell his tale solely from the perspective of a woman.
Julie Fitzgerald arrives home from a week at a health farm with her "ballbreaker" friend, Sylvana, to find a yellow Wonderbra draped around the front door handle and clothes dotting the kitchen floor like hothouse flowers. A quick bit of investigation reveals that Ronan, her dentist husband, and an unidentified blonde in a bikini are downstairs, sunbathing beside the communal swimming pool. Julie's first impulse is the classic one of the woman spurned - she takes a very heavy object to Ronan's prized Porsche - but thereafter, her behaviour starts getting odder by the minute. Sneaking out of the apartment without a confrontation, she finds out where the blonde, Nicole, lives, and hares over there to demolish that too. Then she invites her eccentric and acerbic mother to stay, knowing how much Ronan is riled by her company.
But that's when Julie does something really bizarre - she befriends Nicole, who is unaware that the unexpectedly kind stranger who enters her life is in fact her lover's wife. This sets the scene for all manner of slightly dark and twisted situations, confrontations and conversations, and it is to Gallagher's credit that all of them are just about feasible, if not exactly likely. The Feng-Shui Junkie sets its sights firmly on the market in which Marian Keyes, Freya North and Jane Green enjoy such popularity. Unashamedly easy to read and fast-moving, it doesn't set out to tax the brain of its reader or to make any great impression on the world of high-brow fiction. Some might say it takes a brave man to venture into this terrain yet Gallagher looks likely to make his mark in this genre, by virtue of his lively writing and his eye for detail, but most of all, because of the wickedly black twists to his tale.
Whenever an author chooses to write solely from the perspective of the other gender - and particularly if the subject is the dastardly behaviour of the opposite sex - it's relevant to ask whether he or she has achieved their objective. Certainly the voice of Julie Fitzgerald is believable, and perhaps more importantly, the characters of Sylvana and Julie's mother, Gertrude, are well-drawn and interestingly quirky.
Perhaps the only hint as to the gender of The Feng-Shui Junkie's author is in the increasingly picaresque, warped and macho revenge which Julie starts to inflict on Nicole and Ronan. As she mooches through the city leaving a trail of dead fish, broken glass and incinerated works of art, Julie is like nothing so much as the Bruce Willis character in the Die Hard films. Yet the novel is none the worse for this; indeed it's refreshing, if not always realistic, to read of a dumped woman who does something a little more pro-active than slump into a trough of chocolates and Kleenex.
Louise East is an Irish Times journalist