It has been a long time since a novel captured a time and place as powerfully as Emma Flint's shattering debut ... she is hardly the creature of low morals and icy veins who is driving tabloid sales. Her devastating inner monologues reveal quite the opposite: Her grief 'was black and hungry and huge like an open, roaring mouth...And inside it: the loneliness, the loss, the lost-ness.' In portraying '60s New York culture with all its boozing, corruption and sexism, Flint goes where Mad Men dared not go. That the author is British makes her achievement all the more amazing.

It is a reimagining that is deftly done and centres on the vivid portrait of Flint’s version of the mother, Ruth Malone. Flint pulls the reader into the finely observed working-class Queens neighbourhood, where the heat shimmers on the crowded apartment buildings and the social surveillance of women is palpable ... The strongest sections of the novel allow us behind Ruth’s brittle mask of makeup and pride. Flint describes her grief, loss and loneliness with a tough delicacy that is both exact and heart-wrenching. Her haphazard, nicotine-drenched good-enough mothering is wonderfully written, as is her ambition to escape the confines of the small town she left: to lead a better life, a bigger life than the one allotted her because of her sex ... The opening chapters are gripping but there is a lag in the tension in the middle section. Flint writes powerfully of Ruth’s stunned grief, a grief she deadens with alcohol and sex. The last third of the book, her trial, is absolutely riveting. The ending may or may not convince you, but that is perhaps immaterial: Little Deaths is a strong and confident addition to the growing trend of domestic dystopias – novels about flawed, angry, hurt women navigating hostile social and intimate milieus that turn viciously punitive when those women rebel.

Even though Flint is British, she nails with authority the voices, commonplace wisdom and dusty claustrophobia of the borough. Just as important, Flint captures the mundane yet mythic horror of the case that has memorialized it in the annals of New York City crime ... Flint is scrupulous about centering this moody thriller in the facts, yet giving them a deeper psychological spin. In a way that feels measured rather than salacious, Flint also manages to keep aloft the crucial question of 'Who murdered the children?' until the very last pages. As a novel inspired by tragic real-life events, Little Deaths is atmospheric and plausible.

Inspired by a real-life case, the outlines of Emma Flint’s debut summon every classic noir chestnut: the vixen, the patsy, the shady detective, the cub reporter determined to set the record straight. Her actors are strictly familiar, and rarely surprising; they come and go and mostly play their parts. The exception is Ruth: In lean, palpable prose (Flint is British, though her New York vernacular never slips), she comes vividly alive—a flawed, complicated woman with thoughts and demons and desires that the prescribed world she lives in offers hardly any framework for, and even less forgiveness. As a whodunit, Little Deaths is standard-issue. As a character study, it’s a killer.

What is dynamite is first-time novelist Flint’s ability to strike a match on page one and keep the flame burning for the next 300 pages ... She doesn’t stiff the readers, but Ms. Flint does make them wait, almost until the end, to reveal the who, what, when, where, why and how. It may not make you gasp, but it likely will shock or surprise you, even if you’re a seasoned mystery fan ... Ms. Flint dramatically describes the damaging disconnect between how the world sees and judges Ruth and the emotional storm raging inside.

Emma Flint’s novel focuses on two children who are found dead, with all the evidence suggesting their mother—who lives a somewhat questionable life—is the murderer … More than anything, Emma Flint analyzes the stigma that people who make edgy decisions and women who live more promiscuously than others are somehow bad people. This in turn forces readers to put themselves under the microscope, too … While still a mystery at heart, Flint’s novel has a lot of soul. Little Deaths is a fast, compelling read that will leave readers questioning far more than just who did it and why.

Eschewing easy answers or Perry Mason miracles, Flint focuses squarely on Ruth’s stiflingly straitened life in working-class Queens, close enough to gaze at the bewitching lights of Manhattan yet distant enough to feel marooned in another galaxy. This stunning novel is less about whodunit than deeper social issues of motherhood, morals, and the kind of rush to judgment that can condemn someone long before the accused sees the inside of a courtroom.

Flint’s debut novel begins in a prison cell, where Ruth Malone struggles to awaken from a dream of her old apartment building in Queens … She is believed to be a bad mother, a woman who goes to too many bars, sees too many men, drinks too much booze, a woman who has recently dumped her husband even though he was ready to forgive her for cheating on him. Her only significant ally is a young newspaperman who at first sees the case as the key to launching his career but becomes so obsessed that he quits the paper to try to prove Ruth’s innocence … Sharply rendered literary noir.