Damaged Goods 
 The thought of his hurt, of the loss to the children, if they ever found out that they had been loving someone who didn't exist, leaves her gasping for breath. He thinks she's a good person damaged by life. She knows, deep down, that she is--must be--rotten to the core, and that the one thing she must do is protect them all from the ugly truth. 
 This is Kirsty Lindsay, a reporter with courage and a conscience. She is middle-class, well-educated, the mother of two, married to a banker--and a convicted child murderer. I mean that in both senses. As we learn from the prologue of this terrific debut thriller, Kirsty (as we know her now) was one of two eleven-year-old children convicted of murdering a girl of only four, in a case that shook all of Britain in 1986. Marwood, who is apparently a reporter herself, takes little vignettes from the day of the crime and intersperses them into her main story, set in a seedy English seaside resort 25 years later, when circumstances conspire to bring the two former culprits together again. 
 I struggled with including even this much information, because Marwood is masterly in how she lays it out. But the back cover of the book will tell you this and more, and I cannot convey any sense of the moral complexities that make the novel so special without going into the double lives of the two main characters. It is essentially a study of what makes a human being what she is: nature or nurture, if you like. As we learn more of the day that made the two children do what they did, we reach our own conclusions about their characters and culpability. This in turn illuminates their behavior now, as they are drawn into the rising tensions of a town rocked by a series of rape-murders at the hands of a killer known only as the Seaside Strangler. What part of who they are now is the work of their own actions since being released on parole, how much results from the punishment or rehabilitation they received while in prison, how much derives from their families and upbringing (for they come from quite different backgrounds), and how much is simply some innate quirks of their makeup? As the story heads into a nail-biting climax at the end of a deserted pier in a rainstorm at night, these abstract questions will be put to a very practical test--literally a matter of life and death--that surprised me by making me recalibrate my moral compass yet again. And even after that, Marwood springs a couple more surprises that deepen our understanding further. 
 I have not yet mentioned the second of the two girls. This is Amber Gordon, the night cleaning supervisor at Funnland, the tatty amusement park that is the central attraction of the town. She is shown as a considerate boss, always on the lookout for bits of unclaimed property with which to reward members of her staff, several of whom we also get to know as individuals. Long before we learn of her former identity, we have come to know and like her. That deep sympathy may be shaken by later events, but it is never entirely erased. Partly this is because Amber is so clearly a better person than many of the people portrayed around her. It soon becomes clear, for instance, that there is more than one murderer, and there is plenty of other wrongdoing and general loutish behavior to go around. Marwood's portrayal of Kirsty's marriage to an honorable man who happens to have lost his job is equally nuanced. Though there may be important psychological themes at play, what makes Marwood's novel work so superbly is that her characters and their feelings are so darned real. 
 [I should warn American readers, however, that this is a very British book. It is not just the language; the seaside setting and the behavior found there is much more typical of Britain than the US. There are also numerous references to famous figures that even I as an ex-pat have never heard of. And the conduct of the tabloid press is totally different to what we would find in America, escalating the action in a way that might seem melodramatic or contrived to those whose knowledge stops at the Times or Guardian.]