The shape of snakes & acid row

The shape of snakes: "November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets - and in West London a black woman known as Mad Annie dies in a rain-soaked gutter. Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason - that she was murdered. For something passed between Annie and Mrs Ranelagh at the moment of death."--Back cover. Acid row: "Is the name of the beleaguered inhabitants give to the place they live. A no-man's land of single mothers and fatherless children where angry, alienated teenagers control the streets. Into this battleground comes Sophie Morrison, a young doctor visiting a patient in Acid Row. Little does she know that she's entering the home of a known paedophile. And with reports circulating that a tormented child called Amy has disappeared, the viglantes are out in force."--Back cover.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.