In present day London Jean, a failing journalist, is researching a 19th century music hall mind-reading act featuring Kate French, known as the Martian Girl. Jean is involved with an arrogant, and ultimately psychopathic, barrister called Coates. We also learn that Kate’s partner in the act, Draper, is also an unattractive and violent personality.

In each strand the male character commits horrendous crimes and becomes fearful that his female counterpart has knowledge of his deeds and plans to either blackmail him or give him up to the police.

As each narrative strand develops we see them converging and expect a finale with the historic and present day mirroring each other. As the novel progresses we become more invested in the characters and the evil of both Coates and Draper becomes more frightening. The revelations of the historic strand are shocking and we expect these to be reflected in, or redeemed by, the final unravelling of the present day story. Unfortunately, this is not how the novel ends.

The Coates character unravels deliciously, falling under the spell of an internal voice he calls the Head of Chambers, but ultimately never delivers. For the last quarter of the book Coates wanders around London threatening all sorts of mayhem, but never actually does anything. The epilogue attempts to wrap the two narrative strands together, but provides perfunctory and dramatically weak answers.

The first 80% of this book is excellent with lots of suspense, mystery and action. However, everything is wrapped up in a mad rush at the end, as if the author suddenly realised he had a train to catch and need to finish the book in a moment.

Ultimately, unsatisfactory. ( )

What a disappointment. I had generally felt that I could rely on Andrew Martin to deliver an engrossing and robust plot with engaging characters. On this occasion he fell sadly short on all those fronts.

The Martian Girl of the title was Kate French, a music hall entertainer working as part of a mindreading act at the end of the nineteenth century. Back in 2018, Jean Beckett, who scrapes a living as an occasional journalist, subsidised by support from her parents, is struggling to complete a one woman show based upon the life of Kate French, to be staged at a small venue in Rotherhithe. She is, meanwhile, engaged in an occasional relationship with Coates, a married man who had formerly practised as a barrister. Coates leads a very complicated life which includes time with his wife and daughter interspersed with dalliances with Jean as well as visits to a brothel which caters to his more esoteric tastes.

I enjoyed reading about Jean’s effort to complete her monologue about Kate French, but the rest of the novel, which gradually expanded to form the principal story, became increasingly irritating and implausible. ( )

To be clear, this is not a book about Martians, or even girls. The central character is a woman in her late thirties, Jean Beckett, a writer who lives in today's London. She is writing a one-woman play -- later it becomes a novel -- about a young woman named Kate French who lived in London a century earlier, and performed on stage as "The Martian Girl". There are clear parallels in the lives of the two women, particularly in the men who are central to those lives and who turn out to be (no spoilers here) real jerks. This is a brilliant novel, with well-drawn characters, and an acute knowledge of London now and as it was at the end of the 19th century. It's about writing, and research, and deception, and fear and love. Andrew Martin is an accomplished writer of historical mysteries, but this is the first of his that I've read. It will not be the last. ( )