Once upon a time there were three little girls. They grew up
to be three very different women but they had three things in
common. Times have changed, however, and the latter-day
Charlie’s Angels depicted in Thea Wolff’s The Honey
Trap are barely recognisable as our hotpants-sporting,
hairspraytoting, ass-kicking heroines of old. The locale has
shifted to Noughties London, Boswell is now a fifty-yearold
Spanish babysitter, and Charlie a pre-op transvestite who prefers
to be known as Fiona. Owing, perhaps, to a recent deficit of kidnapped millionaires,
the girls are now ridding the world of evil and corruption by
giving paranoid wives proof of their husbands’ philandering:
which they achieve by seducing the poor suckers themselves.
Despite describing itself as ‘comic crime fiction’,
this book sits squarely in the chick-lit category, so those who
demand heart-stoppingly beautiful prose and daring social comment
from their bedtime reading would be well-advised to steer clear.
Thus warned, however, Wolff’s frank, chatty writing and
well-developed sense of the ludicrous will not disappoint those
looking for a light-hearted antithesis to contract law or Greek
tragedy. Indeed, the hapless heroine’s admittedly crap attempts at
dealing with incidents ranging from finding a severed finger in
her garden to ‘accidentally’ sleeping with a
client’s masochistic husband imbued me with a heartwarming
appreciation of my own sanity. I could criticize the lack of a
cohesive plot, I could complain about the overly colloquial
style, I could admit that the time spent reading this agreeable
froth would have been better spent writing my essay; but, after
all, isn’t that just the point?ARCHIVE: 1st week TT 2004
The Honey Trap
