By Kerryn Goldsworthy
Little Deaths
Emma Flint
Little Deaths, by Emma Flint.
Picador, $29.99
In the late 1960s a 28-year-old red-haired cocktail waitress called Alice Crimmins, resident of the working-class borough of Queens in New York City, was convicted of the murders of her two children. Emma Flint is the latest in a string of writers to base a book, play or movie on this notorious case. The two best things about her novel are the glimpses she gives into the state of mind and emotions of her heroine, here called Ruth Malone, and the vivid recreation of the time and place. Readers who remember the Lindy Chamberlain case will immediately recognise the rhetoric and the implicit sexism of police and media and the fact that she refuses to cry makes her, in their eyes, an unnatural woman. All of these things arouse suspicion. The book is heavy-handed, but the story itself is strong enough to survive that.