Other People's Rules

Rating:
Summary: the "in" crowd
Review: 15 year old Lucy Diamond finds herself invited by her new friend, Sarah to be a guest in her home, one of the wealthiest and influential families of England. This family has rubbed shoulder with royalty! She is a little overawed by their elegance, extravagence, but is thrilled to be part of it all.

The family seems a little eccentric, with frequent trips away for the mother to 'dry out' and the father, Ivar seems to have a 'thing' for adolescent girls. Lucy finds herself being caught in his web. When the beautiful young heiress, Katie disappears one night from the Gatehouse family grounds, Lucy is shocked to realise that she may hold the key to the mystery. She, perhaps is the last person who saw Katie alive.

Despite her knowledge that the Gatehouse family have enough money and influence to have friends in all the high places, Lucy is brought forward to speak at the muder trial, when Katie's body is found. Will the truth win? Does justice apply to all? An engrossing read.

Rating:
Summary: the "in" crowd
Review: 15 year old Lucy Diamond finds herself invited by her new friend, Sarah to be a guest in her home, one of the wealthiest and influential families of England. This family has rubbed shoulder with royalty! She is a little overawed by their elegance, extravagence, but is thrilled to be part of it all.

The family seems a little eccentric, with frequent trips away for the mother to 'dry out' and the father, Ivar seems to have a 'thing' for adolescent girls. Lucy finds herself being caught in his web. When the beautiful young heiress, Katie disappears one night from the Gatehouse family grounds, Lucy is shocked to realise that she may hold the key to the mystery. She, perhaps is the last person who saw Katie alive.

Despite her knowledge that the Gatehouse family have enough money and influence to have friends in all the high places, Lucy is brought forward to speak at the muder trial, when Katie's body is found. Will the truth win? Does justice apply to all? An engrossing read.

Rating:
Summary: A revealing look at Scotland's aristocrats
Review: By the time, Lucy Diamond turned fifteen she was lonely having no friends and parents more interested in her success in her studies than her being a complete child. It is through Mrs. Diamond's job that Lucy meets Sarah AcKworth, the daughter of an Earl and Countess, as blue-blooded an aristocrat as can be found in the twentieth century. The Earl has no qualms about using his wealth and power to crush an enemy.

When Lucy enters Sarah's world, the excitement, glamour, and beauty blind her. She wants acceptance and if that means drinking and smoking pot, so be it. Lucy also ignores the Earl's pedophiliac obsession with young teens including his own daughter. To gain entrance into the inner circle, Lucy sleeps with the Earl. When a teenager the Earl covets vanishes without a trace, the elite close ranks against outsiders like Lucy. The police catch the killer. Years later on his deathbed, the convicted murderer recants his confession. Lucy reenters the inner circle, but as a mature adult seeking the truth.

Julia Hamilton has written a riveting, shocking, yet believable tale about the rich and powerful getting away with murder due to their connections. The heroine is initially gullible but matures into a courageous morally upstanding woman willing to sacrifice her marriage and career to insure justice occurs. This disturbing work leaves the reader with a distressing bitter aftertaste about the justice system. Yet the novel leaves hope that books like OTHER PEOPLE'S RULES will force justice to truly become blind.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: good read
Review: i enjoyed this book, because it was well written, excellent character development and am waiting for a sequel to find out how everyone lived out their lives. a young girl meets another whose family is wealthy, well-connected and in a social stratosphere unlike any she has been exposed to. the friends father is a predator (who preys on young teenage girls) and she becomes a willing victim. years later, what comes to the surface is the tragic picture of a family that has banded together and grown into their roles as a result of one too many tragedies. the body of a murder victim is uncovered, a love rekindled, pain revisited and the young girl who has become a capable woman no longer admires that which she once thought was of value - because it was not. the pretense and allusion, she realizes is all that it ever was. there have been few books that have come close to this (especially in the romance department) but this books captures the awe, the temptation, the glossy presentation that is false.

Rating:
Summary: Diverting but derivative
Review: I found this to be an enthralling page-turner, and I had to restrain myself from reading ahead, but after only a couple of chapters I had a strong sense of deja vu (deja lu?). That the book draws significantly from "Brideshead Revisited" is noted early and often by the author herself, in a disappointingly obvious manner. But "Other People's Rules" also seems to worship at a less-exalted altar, Dominick Dunne's semi-trashy "A Season in Purgatory," a roman a clef loosely based on the Martha Moxley murder and its Kennedy connection. As in "Brideshead" and "Purgatory," the first-person narrator in "Rules" is a middle-class but comparatively impoverished young person drawn in by the privilege and eccentricities of a wealthy family; however, "Rules" resembles "Purgatory" not merely in theme but in plot points as well. While the similarities may be entirely coincidental, they diminished my enjoyment of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Diverting but derivative
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Although it was filled with a bit of British stuffiness, I was able to get through easily. I could sympathize with Lucy's situation when she first comes to Gatehouse Park. Lucy was completely overwhelmed when she entered the lives of the rich and famous. She was basically a lonely nobdy thrust into an atmosphere of family parties, money and of course sex. She is impressionable and is taken advantage of by her friend's father, Ivar. However, it seems that Lucy may have witnessed the precursor events of a murder. She is scared to death and flees. 20 yrs later, the body of the girl is found and Lucy is the star witness. The book didn't end the way I expected and I was delightfully surprised when I found this book wasn't just one other book with a happy ending. It wasn't. I did find Lucy's injury a bit predictable... it seemed that I knew something was going to happen to her before it did. But all in all, I like the book and found it interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Not a bad plot - shame about the grammar
Review: This book's grammar and sentence construction is absolutely excrutiating! What was the author/editor thinking? By way of example, check out p.53-54 (of the Harper Collins paperback) where 27 lines are divided into a mere three sentences. The sentence, "It was 1958 and he was hanging out in Soho and lodging with Lady Sadie McGowan, a bohemian grandee who had a large house in Tite Street, where, as Sissy confided to the bridge table, he was paying his way by playing his music at parties and meeting all the wrong kinds of people." is a particular favourite of mine.

That said, if you can grit your teeth through the grammar, the book's plot is gripping and keeps the reader's interest throughout. The last few chapters were a little odd - was there an editorial edit over the ultimate fate of Katie Grisham? It just seemed to me that rather a lot was left to the imagination. Perhaps that was the idea?

Overall comment - worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Other People's Rules
Review: This is a rich, dark novel, brilliantly written by Julia Hamilton, in a style that is reminiscent of Nancy Mitford and L. P. Hartley. Like Mitford, Julia Hamilton presents us with the insular and enclosed lives of the British upper class; all the while dissecting it with flashes of ironic humour -- coming across Margaret Thatcher describes as "Mad Maggie" is something I shall always personally treasure! And like L.P. Hartley, Julia Hamilton presents us with a sympathetic protagonist, Lucy Diamond, whom we first meet as a unsure sixteen year old, the outsider to the magical world of Gatehouse, who seems to absorb the unpleasantness and the secrets that swirl around without actually registering them until too late.

This is not a mystery novel, it is more of a psychological novel. Almost from the very beginning we are told that the murder of Katie Gresham probably did take place on Gatehouse land, the home of Ivar Gatehouse, the Earl Gatehouse. Ivar Gatehouse is one of the rising stars of Magaret Thatcher's government. He is rich, charming and handsome. Unfortunately for Ivar, his family seems to be completely screwed up. Luca Diamond is introduced to the rich, glamourous world of the Gatehouses through Ivar's youngest daughter, Sarah. And in spite of Lucy's mother's reservations, Lucy is completely seduced by that world. And it isn't too long before Lucy is seduced by Ivar as well. And this is where young Katie Gresham enters the novel. Unlike Lucy, Katie is part of Ivar's upper class world; and unlike Sarah and Lucy, Katie is no insecure teenager. Ivar seems to be completely taken with Katie much to Lucy's and Sarah's chagrin. And then after a party one night, Katie disappears. Her body is never found; and when a sociopath who has been kidnapping and torturing young girls to death is caught, Katie's disappearance is tied to him as well. However years later, on his deathbed, he claims innocence over Katie's death. The police reopen the case and this time around the focus is on Ivar and all the unsavory rumours concerning his penchant for teenage girls and his infamous murderous rages. Lucy Diamond, now a successful divorce lawyer is again drawn to the happenings at Gatehouse. But it takes an almost tragedy before Lucy is able to look objectively at what happened all those years ago and break the wall of silence that the Gatehouses and their kind have constructed to keep the outsiders at bay.

This novel is superb on so many levels: the brilliant manner in which the authour has layered all the characters and all the events; the clean lines along which the plot is written -- no extraneous characters or events here; and most of all the portrayal of the deeply troubled and confused protagonist, Lucy Diamond. Another point I appreciated was that Ivar Gatehouse, even by the end of the novel, remains a question mark -- perhaps monsters should remain that way so that the horrors of what they have perpetrated remain in place. One other thing that struck me all over again while reading this novel was how similar the world of the upperclass was to that of the village working class -- both are close-knit, insular, deeply suspicious of outsiders, and both are liberally peopled with eccentric characters.

This is not a novel with a deeply intricate plot. Rather, the story is a sadly simple one of what happens when there is a sociopath in your life. It is a rich and dark tale, liberally peopled with memorable characters. Definitely a novel that is worth reading and rereading.