The gripping sequel to bestselling THE FOUR STREETS . Shot through with darkness, but also humour, warmth and charm.

Those victims of abuse and paedophilia at the hands of the Catholic Church deserve redress and proper recognition but this novel insults their suffering rather than presenting their case in a sympathetic manner. This is a powerful novel which challenges the emotions of its reader; feelings of anger, sadness, joy' The events of the book are still with me days after finishing it, such a compelling read I cannot recommend it enough'

One critic stated that her first novel was 'vacuous'. I would have wished that this second in the trilogy was the same. Rather it took content which she didn't have the skill to use properly. In the Four Streets in Liverpool, a dreadful murder has been committed, and 14-year-old Kitty Doherty is pregnant with the dead man's child. This secret is so dangerous that her mother, Maura, and the redoubtable Kathleen, her best friend Nellie's grandmother, decide the girls must be spirited away quietly to Ireland to await the birth of the baby.

The language is all wrong. It sounds like the language of the god-awful TV series Mrs Brown's Boys more than anything you would hear in mid-20th century Liverpool and doesn't contain any of the humour that differentiates Scouse from other British dialects. A dialect that took from all those who passed through the city and created something unique. But that's far above Dorries expertise. Dorries decided on a mish mash of current (2010s), hot political and social issues and placed them into a Liverpool of the 1960s. The problem is that such abuse certainly existed at that time but the incompetence that Dorries employs in her story does a dis-service to those who suffered from religious and institutional corruption and exercise of power in the past – and, unfortunately, in the present. I also liked the gentle humour that emerged - very much a feature of the gallows humour of that time' Everything feels wrong with the story. Her characters are all stereotypes, from the almost saint like parents of one family to the slattern and wasteful ne'er-do-well of the lazy and wasteful neighbours, with their dirty, often beaten and neglected children; from the kindly, honest if frightened of the Catholic Church hierarchy nun to those nuns in Ireland who are evil incarnate; from the 'simple minded' servant girl to the nosey neighbours; etc., etc.