I have just read Music for Torching. I couldn't put it down. In fact I didn't put it down. It reads like a mixture of Desperate Housewives and The Stepford Wives, but is much, much more vicious.

Suburban New York (did I get that right?) in the late 90s: homemaker women and their businessmen husbands, with their kids and their houses and lawns and backyards (I can never get used to the idea of a yard as a garden - the Brit in me can't help but see a yard as something made of concrete). No one is likable (I don't mind that at all); the dialogue is sharp; the dystopia is powerful; the wit is pointed. But here's the thing that nagged at me all the time.

It was only through product placement, and mentions of mobile phones that I had any idea which decade we were in. Our couple-of-focus, Paul and Elaine, had apparently been 60s liberals. But in their forties, ie when we meet them, they read nothing - and I mean nothing at all; they don't watch anything on TV except possibly the weather forecast, though they do watch rented videos. So they seem entirely cut off from the world beyond their immediate concerns, and their neighbours are exactly the same.

I couldn't decide whether this was done in order to underline the navel-gazing meaninglessness of their lives, or...
It cannot be an oversight. This is A.M.Holmes after all, who is far too assured and controlled a writer to let anything slip away from her.

Help me, someone?