A creaky old house; a woman living alone; a Van Morrison CD that seems to have a mind of its own. Sarah Dunant gives this "was-that-an-intruder-or-is-it-just-the-poltergeist-again" thriller a hardboiled slant by making of her heroine a self-possessed Czech translator who's cool with pornography and friendly with the local female vicar, and experiments with the accepted machismo of the thriller form by having her first collaborate in her own rape, then take her own kind of revenge. Dunant makes clever use of sleazy material in the form of a violent pot-boiler which her heroine is in the throes of translating, but in the end all it proves is that misogyny is misogyny, whatever way you look at it.
Arminta Wallace