Vaseem Khan – The Girl In Cell A (2025)

Preamble

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!

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Review

This is a departure from Vaseem Khan’s previous series, which I’ve enjoyed but not yet found time to write up! It’s an accomplished entry from him into a new genre. I had to take some time to settle on exactly what sort of rating and review I wanted to write, and that’s always a sign of a novel being highly effective in how it drags you from pillar to post. This rating is a reconciliation of that knowing joy of re-reading a book’s construction after I’d finished it and some of the frustrations and puzzlement I felt while I was reading it.

I tend not to mind first-person or present tense; it’s fitting to this type of story. I did wonder why the first-person present tense narration of past events is in the past perfect (“he had been”) rather than the past tense (“he was”) though, and this didn’t quite make sense to me when I’d finished, just as it didn’t make sense to me when I started.

Some twists are relatively self-evident from the get-go, but the novel is particularly good at maintaining and using tension in the second half, but I found the early section a little overlong. Orianna, the titular “girl”, I found engaging, and I enjoyed following her throughout the bulk of the book. The psychiatrist evaluating her in the “then” portions of the book I found less compelling, but in hindsight there is enough of her to enable the character to serve her plot function in a constructive and believable way, and I suspect I would warm to her a little more on re-reading.

One grumble is that there are one or two loose ends from the early phase of the book that I think really do need some explicit resolution or reference at the end. For example, the reader may wonder: Why is Orianna a celebrity, apparently with glamour? This isn’t really clarified in the book. One is able to make a deduction at the end, but I think I would have been a little more satisfied if it had been spelt out. But the thing that had me really exclaiming aloud to myself is this: there is a particular character name (and more broadly then a particular theme) that one simply cannot use to this extent without eventually giving a wink to the reader that you know, you know! I won’t say anymore here, but the “See Also” list might offer a clue.

See also

These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• Uncle Vampire (Cynthia D Grant)
• Hydra (Matt Wesolowski)
• The Silent Patient (Alex Michaelides)
• Hemlock Grove

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Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!