Review of "Transgressions" by Sarah Dunnant

Not read any Sarah Dunant before, but on the strength of this I will. It starts off a bit dull, about a woman who has recently separated from her apparently rather obnoxious partner getting used to being alone, and sometimes missing things that he's taken in the separation of things. And she's a translator, translating a rather sleazy novel from Czech to English, which gives Dunant permission to indulge in writing sleaze - porn-adjacent crime fiction, I'd say.

But then there's a stalker, and the vague threats coalesce into something much darker, and the sleaze migrates from the book-within-a-book to the main narrative, and it went from being something that I read at night to go to sleep to something that I had to avoid reading last thing at night. Trigger warning - there's some rape, but also some hint of rape fantasies too.

There's a small additional pleasure in the technology, which is pre-mobile and pre-web, even though it's by no means a "historical" novel.

Small declaration of interest. I haven't actually met Sarah Dunant, but she is the partner of a member of the Stroud Red Band, so that's sort of connected.