The Double Life of Cora Parry

Cora, a workhouse orphan, is thrown into the Victorian underworld and under the baleful influence of Fletch, a tough girl dressed as a boy, who rules a slum refuge for the destitute funding it through pickpocketing and burglary. It’s a tale rich in the atmosphere of the lower depths, owing something to Dickens via Garfield, that takes a gothic turn when Cora’s adoption of an alternative persona, grown out of her shame at her thieving life, acquires a separate doppelganger existence of its own, more daring and ruthless than Cora herself. It’s a clever and disturbing idea, whose potential is not quite realised. Fletch, a figure who deserves better from her author, is caught and locked up away from the story two thirds of the way through, and a half-hearted sub-plot in which a sinister black coach is spiriting young women away from the workhouse is resolved too easily, offering an ending which is neither believable nor in tune with the tenor of what has gone before.