AUTHOR: S.K. TREMAYNE | PUBLISHER: HARPER COLLINS | FORMAT: PAPERBACK | RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 6TH (AVAILABLE NOW ON KINDLE)
It sits there in your kitchen or in your bedroom or in your living room. It’s a little plastic disc and it lights up and perkily responds to your every demand, whether it’s finding the nearest takeaway restaurant, playing your favourite music, or updating you on the weather forecast. It gets a bit sniffy sometimes; ask it to tell you an off-colour joke and it’ll haughtily respond “I don’t know any of them, I don’t think they’re very funny”. So we’re told. The likes of Alexa and Siri have changed our lives… but what if they suddenly started behaving a little more sinisterly? What if they started making threats, encouraging you to kill yourself because “I know what you did”. What if your handy little device suddenly decided to ruin your life and turn everyone you know and love against you and used a foolish mistake you made in the past to completely destroy your comfortable 21st-century existence?
In S.K. Tremayne’s latest enjoyable, if slightly hysterical, page-turner, struggling recently-divorced journalist Jo Ferguson, sharing a flat in upmarket Camden with her best friend, finds her life disintegrating when the flat’s Electra devices start tormenting her with memories she has tried to consign to history. Her life becomes a living nightmare, and it’s only a matter of days before she has no idea who she can turn to and who she can trust as Electra conspires to push her over the edge by completely dismantling her existence and forcing her to question her own sanity.
It’s tempting to dismiss The Assistant as a ‘guilty pleasure’ pot-boiler, the sort of book you pick up and thunder through for a bit of undemanding light relief, but there’s actually a bit more meat on the bones than you might expect. Tremayne’s writing is urgent and compelling – if a little histrionic at times – and Jo is a believable, deeply-flawed but ultimately likeable and sympathetic protagonist. The same can’t be said of many of the supporting characters, irritating self-obsessed London-centric egos with names like Arlo, Gul, and Tabitha and they quickly become as unbearable and unlikeable as Jo is endearing despite her own pretensions and shortcomings. Tremayne clearly knows the book’s real-world locations well, and they’re brought vividly to life (even though the book takes place in the sort of Antarctic, blizzard-bedevilled winter we just don’t get in this country these days), and there’s a stifling sense of Jo’s world collapsing around her as Electra – or whoever is manipulating Electra – closes the net and closes down Jo’s life.
The Assistant is a brisk, busy read, an old school thriller with a determinedly modern world setting and you’ll quickly find yourself revelling in the twists and turns of the plot (however unlikely) and groaning at the slightly perfunctory tying-up of certain loose ends (especially one which very much drives the novel, wrapped up with an offhand ‘Oh well, it was a long time ago, why rake over the past?’). Flawed but fun, The Assistant is ideal summer reading guaranteed to help you while away a few lazy summer afternoons.
