TEN years in the writing, the second novel from Donna Tartt was never going to be a light little holiday read.

In fact, nothing less than a six-week sabbatical would really do justice to this mighty tome.

At almost 600 pages, by a writer who doesn't do short and snappy and is not entirely comfortable unless a paragraph covers at least three-quarters of a page and a chapter is 150 pages long, this is not a book for the faint-hearted or weak-limbed.

But enough of the quantity, what about the quality? Every sentence in this book about childhood obsessions and familial revenge in the American south is adroitly constructed; every word is carefully chosen; and every comma, colon and dash is painstakingly well-placed.

And yet there is something ultimately unsatisfying about this novel - something that leaves the reader feeling a little cheated and a little nave for waiting so patiently for the best part of a decade for Ms Tartt to put pen to paper once again.

For those of us who devoured her first book, The Secret History, so greedily and with such gusto, and who so enjoyed her intelligent prose and clever interweaving of academic ponderings with thriller-style plotting, her second offering was perhaps inevitably always going to be second best.

This is not to say that The Little Friend is by any means a bad book. It is a deep, thoughtful look into the world of a deep, thoughtful child searching for the man she believes killed her brother. It is, in parts, an exciting ride through the life of a young girl caught up in a cat and mouse game in which the mouse doesn't even know that the cat exists.

But all too often the game becomes slow and laboured, and the most interesting characters - Harriet, the strange and often disturbing child at the heart of the dysfunctional Defresnes clan and her four quarrelsome aunts - drift away from the board for far too long, seen only in fleeting silhouettes for page after page after page.

Perhaps Ms Tartt's editors were so pleased to receive her manuscript after such a long wait that they felt it would be cruel of them to cut it. In this case, however, a cut or two would have been the kindest option.

Updated: 10:31 Wednesday, January 08, 2003